Gobi Desert

About 2 pages (537 words)

Gobi Desert

The Gobi Desert, 1.3 million square kilometers (500,000 square miles) of rugged plains crossing Mongolia and northeastern China, extends roughly from the Great Khingan Mountains (Da Hinggan Ling) in the east to the Tian Shan in the west and from the Altun Shan, Qilian Shan, and Yin Mountains in the south to the Altay Shan and Hangai Mountains in the north. Under this definition the Gobi Desert extends approximately 1,600 kilometers from east to west and 480 to 960 kilometers from north to south. In the Mongolian language the term "gobi" refers to any vast, flat, dry area where people are scarce and where sand and coarse pebbles cover the ground. In fact several deserts on the Central Asian Plateau bear the name, including Gaxun Gobi, Junggar Gobi, Trans-Altay Gobi, and Eastern or Mongolian Gobi.

The Gobi Desert's chalky plateaus consist of bare rocks with intermittent areas of shifting sand. The climate is continental and dry, with severe winters and hot summers. Annual precipitation varies from 6.9 centimeters (2.7 inches) in the west to 20 centimeters (8 inches) in the east. The average lows in January drop to –40°C (–40°F), and the average highs in July reach 45°C (113°F).

Although the region's harsh terrain is a natural barrier, it would be a mistake to describe the land as lifeless.

Shrubs and bushes grow on plains watered by mountain streams. Sandy desert occupies only 3 percent of the total area, and much of the Gobi is high mountains and dry grasslands. These areas are home to wild camels, sheep, ibex, snow leopards, lynx, and steppe foxes. The Gobi was also home to the modern world's last remaining wild horse species, Przewalski's horse, which disappeared from the Mongolian steppe in the 1950s but has been reintroduced to the region since 1992. Animals, grazing lands, and subterranean wells are abundant enough to support sparse human populations of one person per square kilometer.

In the twentieth century the Gobi became noted for its wealth of dinosaur fossils. In 1922 the Central Asiatic Expedition under the direction of Roy Chapman Andrews (1884–1960) first discovered the fossilized remains of dinosaurs in the region, and subsequent researchers found the remains of hundreds of dinosaurs in the Gobi Desert. Many of these finds, including Oviraptor, Stegoceras, Protoceratops, and Velociraptor, were the first of their kind. In some instances the fossils were lying on the desert floor, covered only by a thin layer of dust.

Although the Gobi region has supported a rich variety of flora and fauna from prehistoric to present times, increasing urbanization, livestock grazing, and agricultural development in the last century have upset the Gobi's delicate ecological balance in many areas. For example, the outskirts of cities, such as Sainshand, Mongolia, have seen brushy and grazable land turn to infertile shifting sands as herds overgraze near the city and motorized vehicle traffic increasingly tears up the Gobi's delicate surface. Both the Chinese and the Mongolian governments have instituted projects to counter this man-made degradation, but only time will tell if the Gobi desert is destined to become in actuality the wasteland that many outsiders think it is.