Paradise Lost? Geography, Weather, and the Environment - Don't Know Much About Geography - page 139

remote, the world's deserts actually take up one third of the earth's land surface. What's more, they are
growing, with fearsome consequences for humanity.
The World's Great Deserts
The Sahara (Arabic for “wilderness”) is by far the world's largest, most desolate, and hottest desert.
The world's highest recorded temperature was 136.4˚ F (58˚C), recorded in Al'Aziziya, Libya. In the east-
ern Sahara, near Cairo, the sun shines an average of eleven hours and forty-seven minutes per day. The
Sahara stretches across North Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, covering an area of more
than 3.5 million square miles, dwarfing the other great deserts of the world. Strange as it may seem, the
Sahara was once an expanse of grassland that supported the kind of animal life associated with the African
plains. Cave paintings found in the Sahara show elephants and giraffes and depict cattle herders roaming a
greener Sahara.
Long thought of as a wasteland, the Sahara changed in significance with the discovery of oil, gas, and
iron-ore deposits after World War II. The Sahara is a vast system that includes the Libyan Desert , which
stretches over Libya, Egypt, and Sudan; the Nubian Desert in northeastern Sudan, stretching from the
Nile to the Red Sea and once home of the ancient empire of Cush, which overran Egypt in 750 BC ; and the
Arabian Desert, which runs from the Nile to the Red Sea in Egypt.
The Kalahari is Africa's other major desert area, but it is significantly different from the Sahara. With
an area of about one hundred twenty thousand square miles, the Kalahari spreads over the countries of Bot-
swana, Namibia, and South Africa. Unlike the Sahara, the Kalahari is almost entirely covered with grass
and woodland, with bare sandy stretches appearing only in the driest section in the southwest, where rain-
fall is very low. Although the Kalahari is home to some game, it is only sparsely populated by the nomadic
Bushmen.
A smaller African desert is the Namib , located on the Atlantic coast of Africa in Namibia. It is the
home of the world's tallest sand dune, a crescent-shaped “barchan” dune.
The Red Sea separates the North African desert system from the other great desert belts of the Middle
East. Across the Suez from Egypt is the Sinai Peninsula , a patch of desert historically important as both an
ancient battlefield and a modern one. It was the scene of the forty years spent in the wilderness by Moses
and the tribes of Israel, and the location of Mount Sinai, the holy mountain on which Moses received the
Ten Commandments, which is believed to be either of two existing Sinai peaks, Jebel Serbal or Jebel Musa.
Further East, in Saudi Arabia, there are two major desert areas, the Nafud (Red Desert) and the Rub
al-Khali (Arabic for “Empty Quarter”), which are some two hundred fifty thousand square miles of dry,
hot, windswept dunes. But two overriding factors have made this sparsely settled and parched feudal mon-
archy one of the world's most significant places. Beneath the deserts lie the world's largest petroleum re-
serves. And the Saudi Arabian desert is the birthplace of Islam (Arabic for “submission to God”), making
the desert kingdom the center of the Islamic world.
The Middle Eastern deserts continue to the north with the Syrian or Al Hamad Desert , which covers
the eastern region of Syria and extends into Iraq. Two other large desert systems dominate Iran, Iraq's east-
ern neighbor. They are the Dasht-e-Kavir (Great Salt Desert) and the Dasht-e-Lut (Great Sand Desert).