Deserts Around the Globe

Deserts get a bad reputation. Empty. Lifeless. Endless sand and shimmering heat. But that image barely scratches the surface of what a desert actually is.

Here's the twist that trips up most people: a desert isn't defined by heat at all. It's defined by dryness. A place can be freezing, wind-scoured, and buried in ice, and still qualify as a desert if it gets little enough precipitation. That single technicality reshapes the entire map of where the world's deserts actually are.

And they cover more ground than expected. Roughly one-third of Earth's land surface counts as desert or drylands. These aren't fringe environments. They're a defining feature of the planet.

The variety is staggering. Some deserts are ancient beyond comprehension, having existed in their current form for tens of millions of years while entire mountain ranges rose and eroded around them. Others hide bizarre life found nowhere else — plants that live for over a thousand years on almost no water, snakes that move sideways across dunes because it's the only way to travel on shifting sand.

Then there's the human history buried in them. Lost cities carved into stone. Trade routes that shaped empires. Fossil beds so rich they rewrote the science of dinosaurs, with expeditions in the 1920s pulling astonishing discoveries out of the sand that still fill museum halls today.

Consider the extremes. One desert holds the record for the hottest air temperature ever reliably measured on the planet. Another, thanks to satellite readings, claims the hottest surface temperature. And somewhere out there sits a place so dry that certain weather stations have gone years — real, uninterrupted years — without recording a single drop of measurable rain. How does anything survive in a place like that? Fog, mostly. Which sounds absurd until the mechanics are understood.

From the sand seas of Arabia to the red dunes of Africa, from the frozen expanse at the bottom of the world to the sun-baked flats of the American Southwest, deserts are far stranger and far more alive than they first appear.

So how well do these harsh, beautiful, record-breaking landscapes hold up under scrutiny? Time to find out. Dive into the quiz below and put that knowledge to the test.