So what exactly is a desert? A hot sandy place right? Not necessarily. Officially a desert is anywhere that receives 10 inches (25 cm) of rain or less a year. That means that there’s an awful lot of desert in the world — almost a third of the earth’s land surface! Just the Sahara Desert in northern Africa alone which stretches all the way from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Red Sea in the east covers an area almost as big as the entire United States! There are deserts across the globe — for example in the US the Californian Mojave Desert; in the Middle East the vast Arabian Desert; in Southern Africa the Kalahari and even in little Israel there are two deserts — the Negev and the Judean deserts.    

Although many deserts are just as we imagine them — endless sand dunes — many are not. In fact only 15 percent of the world’s deserts are made of sand. The rest are made up of rocks and mountains or even in the Antarctic Desert of ice.

And as for deserts being hot well that’s not always true either. There are also cold coastal and semi-arid deserts. The Gobi Desert in Asia for example is cold and in the Mongolian desert for half the year the temperature is below freezing. Coastal deserts such as the Namib Desert in Southern Africa are warm in summer and cool in winter while semi-arid deserts which include over a third of Australia aren’t quite as dry as regular deserts receiving up to 35 cm of rain a year.

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