Places in this collection
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Entry № 028Coober Pedy
The opal capital of the world solved the desert sun by moving underground — homes, churches, hotels, and a golf course with no grass at all.
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Entry № 033Sossusvlei & Deadvlei
A forest that died six centuries ago and never fell — black trees on white clay beneath the rusted-red dunes of the Namib.
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Entry № 047The Flaming Cliffs
In 1923 a team here found the first dinosaur eggs anyone recognised as such, and science blamed the wrong animal for stealing them for seventy years.
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Entry № 052The Makgadikgadi Pans
A salt flat on the floor of a lake that outlived its rivers, and the zebra still cross it twice a year.
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Entry № 060Great Sand Dunes
The tallest dunes in North America exist because two creeks carry the escaping sand back. In late spring one of them runs in waves, every twenty seconds.
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Entry № 065Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre
A salt pan most of the time. When floodwater finally arrives from Queensland, pelicans appear in their tens of thousands, and nobody knows how they know.
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Entry № 078Salar de Uyuni
The largest salt flat on Earth, level enough that space agencies test satellites against it, and a mirror when it rains.
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Entry № 079The Nazca Lines
Hundreds of huge lines and animal figures scratched into a Peruvian desert, still being found: in 2024 AI helped confirm 303 new ones.
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Entry № 115Atacama Desert
The driest non-polar desert on Earth, whose soil near Yungay passed Viking-style tests for Mars in 2003, until another team grew microbes from it. In a wet year its southern end flowers.
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Entry № 120McMurdo Dry Valleys
Antarctica's largest ice-free region, where a glacier leaks brine sealed underneath it for perhaps two million years. It comes out clear and turns red in the air.
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Entry № 145Arches
More than 2,000 sandstone arches stand over a buried salt bed in Utah. One fell in the night in 2008, and the Park Service says new ones form about as fast as old ones fall.
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Entry № 152Moynaq
A fishing port on the Aral Sea until the rivers that fed the sea were diverted for cotton. The water has gone out of sight; the town's fishing boats lie rusting on the sand, and the town is still lived in.
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Entry № 154Kolmanskop
A diamond town in the Namib, built after a railwayman picked up a stone in 1908. It had a ballroom, an X-ray station and free ice delivered daily; since 1956 the sand has been moving in.
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Entry № 182Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness
A trail-less badland in north-west New Mexico of grey and rust clay mounds, stone caps on thin necks and petrified logs, with no water and no marked paths. Its rocks record the end of the age of dinosaurs.
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Entry № 187Ischigualasto
A valley of pale, wind-cut badlands under red cliffs in San Juan, Argentina, whose rocks of about 230 million years ago gave up some of the first dinosaurs. A guided circuit of about 40 km leads past a stone mushroom and a stone submarine.
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Entry № 188Richtersveld
A mountain desert on South Africa’s Orange River border with Namibia, watered mostly by sea fog, owned by the Nama and run with them. Its slopes hold the halfmens, a spiny single-stemmed succulent, and its tracks need a four-wheel drive.
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Entry № 191Kobuk Valley
Bare golden dunes over a hundred feet high, north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska, with spruce and tundra at their edge and caribou crossing them. No road goes in: a small plane lands on the sand.
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