Gobi Desert
A cold rain-shadow desert of Mongolia and northern China, famed for its dinosaur fossils
The Gobi is a desert of extremes, a cold, wind-raked expanse of gravel plains and rocky steppe sprawling across southern Mongolia and northern China. Unlike the sand seas of Arabia, much of its 1.3 million square kilometres is bare rock and hard-packed earth, where bitter winters drop well below freezing and brief summers scorch. Sitting in the rain shadow of the Himalayas, which strip the monsoon of its moisture, the Gobi receives barely any precipitation, much of it as snow blown in on Siberian winds.
This is a high desert, most of it lying above 900 metres, ringed by mountains and crossed by the Altai ranges. Its surface ranges from the Mongolian steppe in the north to genuine sandy stretches and the dramatic flaming cliffs of Bayanzag in the south. The continental climate produces some of the widest temperature swings of any desert on Earth, from below minus 40 to above 45 degrees Celsius. Hardy wildlife endures here: wild Bactrian camels, snow leopards in the bordering mountains, and the elusive Gobi bear, one of the rarest animals alive.
The Gobi was the spine of the Silk Road, its oases and caravan towns linking China to Central Asia and beyond. Genghis Khan's Mongol armies rode out from its margins to build the largest contiguous empire in history. In 1922, the explorer Roy Chapman Andrews uncovered the first scientifically recognised dinosaur eggs in the Gobi's red sandstone, and the desert remains one of the world's richest fossil grounds, yielding Velociraptor, Protoceratops, and a parade of Cretaceous creatures.