ATLAS OF THE WORLD’S DESERTS ATLAS OF THE WORLD’S DESERTS Nathaniel Harris Fitzroy Dearborn An Imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group New York • London © 2003 The Brown Reference Group plc All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form Published by Fitzroy Dearborn An imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001–2299 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. and Fitzroy Dearborn An imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE British Library and Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available ISBN 0-203-49166-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-59323-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 1-57958-310-5 (Print Edition) For The Brown Reference Group plc Editors: Robert Anderson, Shona Grimbley, Sally McFall, Ben Morgan, Henry Russell Designer: Lynne Ross Cartographer: Darren Awuah Picture Research: Becky Cox Additional Text: Steve Parker Production Manager: Matt Weyland Production Director: Alastair Gourlay Managing Editor: Tim Cooke Indexer: Kay Ollerenshaw Editorial Director: Lindsey Lowe This edition first published by Fitzroy Dearborn, an Imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group 2003 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. PICTURE CREDITS Art Archive: British Library 139, Musée d’Orsay/Dagli Orti 147; Bruce Coleman Collection: Jen & Des Bartlett 104, E.Bjurstrom 88, Fred Bruemmer 103, John Cancalosi 90, 99, Bruce Coleman Inc. 87, 120t, 120b, Jules Cowan 117, 76, 82, M.P.L.Fogden 80b, 84t, 101, Jeff Foott 47b, 78, 81, Tore Hagman 79, 83, HPH Photography 108, P.Kaya 110, Dr Eckart Pott 80t, 84b, Kim Taylor 97, 98; Corbis: 20, Tom Bean 155, Richard Cummins 74, Robert Garvey 159, Raymond Gehman 113, Richard Hamilton-Smith 50, Peter Johnson 48, Wolfgang Kaehler 144, Steve Kaufman 14, David Lees 133, Charles Lenars 17, Peter Lillie 57, Neil Rabinowitz 47t, Galen Rowell 19, Paul A.Souders 8, Space Shuttle Endeavor 52, Gordon Whitten 12, 46, Martin Withers 49; Hutchison Library: 53, Dave Brinicombe 25, 172, O.R.Constable 170, H.R. 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CONTENTS Introduction 1 Atlas: World Map of Aridity 5 CHAPTER 1 How Deserts Form 7 Atlas: African Deserts 26 CHAPTER 2 Sand, Rock, and Rubble 56 Atlas: Asian Deserts 82 CHAPTER 3 Plants of the Desert 110 CHAPTER 4 Creatures of the Desert 136 Atlas: American Deserts 175 CHAPTER 5 The Desert in History 212 CHAPTER 6 The Modern Desert 238 Atlas: Australia and the Poles 257 CHAPTER 7 Wealth from the Desert 283 CHAPTER 8 Spreading Deserts 303 Glossary 317 Bibliograph 322 Inde 327 Limestone columns rise from the Pinnacle Desert in Western Australia. The hardened columns, which have been exposed by weathering in this coastal region, range from only a few centimeters to 5 meters (16 ft.) in height. Introduction 1 INTRODUCTION In the Western imagination the word “desert” most often evokes a landscape of endless gigantic sand dunes, dazzling white under a cloudless hot-blue sky and a blazing sun. This landscape of the imagination is likely to be empty—deserted—except, perhaps, for a caravan of nomads and camels that inches slowly across the horizon, or a lone man stumbling, sun-blackened and sun-parched, through the heat haze. Or there may even be an emerald-green oasis, where tents are set out in the shade of a palm grove—though this, of course, may be nothing but a tantalizing mirage. This is the magnificent and exotic landscape of movies such as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (1990), and of countless adventure stories of intrepid travelers and explorers. This idealized or classic landscape is not pure fantasy: parts of the Sahara, Arabian, and other deserts fit quite well with this image—though perhaps with less Technicolor vibrancy. The stereotype does, however, contain some misleading notions, of which the most notable is that all deserts are hot, and that heat is crucial in defining what constitutes a desert. Temperature actually plays a secondary role or no role in such definitions—not all deserts are hot, and even so-called hot deserts are not hot all the time. The Gobi Desert deep within Central and East Asia, for example, has relatively cool but erratic temperatures even in summer and can be brutally cold in winter, and in the Sahara temperatures can easily plummet to 4°C (39°F) at night. Modern geographers also recognize the category of the polar desert, applying it to all of Antarctica and parts of the Arctic (notably Greenland), where temperatures day and night stand at the opposite extreme to those of daytime hot deserts. Even a brief perusal of the photographs included in this book will suggest a much more varied, and even nebulous, notion of what is—or is sometimes—meant by the term “desert.” There are vast gravel plains, gleaming expanses of sun-baked salt, and rugged, eroded landscapes of pinnacles, canyons, and rock arches. There are deserts smothered with flowers and blooming cacti; there are others studded with oil wells or scarred by quarries. Some are washed by the ocean and bathed in fog, and some are ice-encrusted polar wildernesses. One of the surprising facts encountered in this book is that only 20 to 30 percent of the world’s deserts are covered by sand, and that the world’s great deserts in fact encompass a huge variety of terrains, not only relative to each other but sometimes within their own boundaries. There is, moreover, little exotic about the desert biome— almost 20 percent of the earth’s land surface is desert, and there are deserts in almost every continent and at every latitude. Of the continents only Europe has no desert area. For many peoples of the world the desert is not a remote fantasy but a reality that impinges on their everyday lives. Atlas of the world's deserts 2 Defining the desert Definitions of the term “desert” are neither static nor absolute. All over the world the term “desert” and its foreign-language equivalents are culturally and topographically specific. European words such as “desert,”“desert” and “Wüste” emphasize the sense of abandonment that is the standard Western response to the desert landscape—an idea that is also reflected in the etymology of the name of the Namib Desert in southern Africa— “the place where there is nothing.” Arabic has not one but several words for “desert,” including erg (applied to large areas of sand or “sand seas”) and hammada (applied to stony plains), as well as the more general sahra, from whose plural form—sahara—the world’s largest desert takes its name. The Turkic kum means literally “sand,” reflecting the sandy wastes of Central Asia—hence the Kara-Kum, or “Black Sand,” of Turkmenistan and the Kyzyl-Kum, or “Red Sand,” of neighboring Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan—while the Persian dasht means “plain” as well as “desert,” in reference to the plateau deserts that dominate central Iran. Physical geographers and geologists must at least attempt to be more scientific in their definitions of what constitutes a desert, and they have debated and extended the possible meanings. Today they agree that the key determining factor is aridity, or the lack of plentiful and consistent rainfall—generally defined as less than 250 millimeters (10 in.) of annual precipitation. Such a definition extends the meaning of desert well beyond its traditional confinement to the hot deserts that have so exercised the European imagination. As Chapter 1 shows, low rainfall is a characteristic not only of the subtropical regions where most of the hot deserts—the Sahara, Arabian, and Australian deserts, for example—are located, but also of continental interiors, the western sides of continents, the leeward side of high mountain ranges, and parts of the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Even this definition is by no means watertight; strict definitions always create seeming anomalies. The Kalahari in southern Africa is labeled a desert in every atlas, and its very name—meaning “the Great Thirst”—would appear to confirm this status.