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Deserts

Dry country of many kinds, from dunes and salt lakes to stony plains, and what people and wildlife have made of it.

20places in this collection
105,000 km²Atacama Desert, the largest area here
277°of longitude, Kolmanskop to Salar de Uyuni
The Flaming Cliffs at Bayanzag: red-orange sandstone escarpments carved into buttresses and gullies, above the flat green-brown floor of the Gobi stretching to the horizon.

Photo: The Flaming Cliffs. Photograph: Richard Mortel, Bayanzag (Flaming Cliffs), Gobi Desert, Mongolia (29), CC BY 2.0, cropped

Desert here means dry country of many kinds: sand dunes in Namibia, Colorado and Arctic Alaska, salt flats and dry lake beds, stony plains and badlands. Salar de Uyuni is a salt flat on the high Altiplano of Bolivia, and the McMurdo Dry Valleys are an Antarctic desert where iron-rich brine runs red from under a glacier. People have made lives in some of them: around half of Coober Pedy's residents live in underground dugouts, and Moynaq, on the old south shore of the Aral Sea, is a fishing port with no sea. Dry ground also keeps fossils, at the Flaming Cliffs in Mongolia's Gobi and in an Argentine valley where some of the first dinosaurs were found.

Side by side

Twelve places whose pages give an area, each drawn as a square of that area, all at one scale.

  1. Atacama Desert105,000 km²about 128,000 km² with the barren lower slopes of the Andes
  2. Makgadikgadi Pans12,000 to 16,000 km²published figures for the whole complex
  3. Salar de Uyuni10,582 km²NASA's older figure is 8,000 km²
  4. Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre9,500 km²when full
  5. Nazca Lines reserve5,633.47 km²the archaeological reserve's restored 2004 boundary
  6. McMurdo Dry Valleys4,500 km²the largest ice-free region in Antarctica
  7. Richtersveld landscape160,000 hectaresthe Cultural and Botanical Landscape, in UNESCO's figure
  8. Ischigualasto60,370 hectaresWikipedia; San Juan's tourism body gives about 62,000
  9. Arches310 km²the national park
  10. Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness45,000 acresof badlands
  11. Kobuk Valley30 square milesof sand in three dune fields; the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes alone 25
  12. Great Sand Dunes30 square milesthe dunefield

Areas as each place's page states them. Each square has the stated area, all at one scale; the squares are not the places' outlines. Hectares, acres and square miles are converted to km² only to draw them. A dashed square is the top of a stated range.

Not drawn: their pages give no area

All 20

About this collection

Notes on sources. This Collection groups existing Field Guide entries; each entry carries its own sources. Written and fact-checked by SockMonkey.com. Last reviewed 29 September 2026.

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The squares use only areas stated on the places' own pages, at one scale. A place without a stated area is listed, not guessed. Each place page names its sources and the date it was checked.