The most powerful deserts of the world.

Massive territories covered in snow or sand, vast expanses and unique animal species- these are what draw visitors to the largest and most powerful deserts in the world.

Antarctic Desert

The Antarctic Desert in Antarctica covers an area of around 14 million km² and is the largest desert in the world. However, it is not the familiar sandy dunes and hills we are used to, but endless ice sheets and snow. The annual amount of precipitation here does not exceed 200 mm. The temperature is very low, reaching as low as -89 degrees in winter and -15 degrees in summer.

Approximately 5000 people visit Antarctica and its desert each year, including expedition groups. Living as a local is rather difficult yet the native inhabitants, including seals, whales, leopard seals, snow petrels, penguins and other animals used to cold temperatures, make it their home.

Arctic Desert

The entire North Pole is the Arctic Desert. It is the second largest desert in the world. The desert is divided by territories controlled by or owned by Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States.

Temperatures here can drop to -40 degrees. The Arctic is very vulnerable due to climate change. And global warming is increasingly causing concern, as it not only affects the Arctic but the whole world. The Arctic is the home of a number of unique animals: the muskox, the wild reindeer, the snow sheep, the polar bear, and more.

Visiting the North Pole is a dream for many, expensive expeditions on nuclear icebreakers deliver not only scientists, but also ordinary tourists right up to the zero meridian of the North Pole. Arctic tourism is not mass, but it is quite popular among travelers who have 'been around the world'. The number of tourists coming to the islands and archipelagos of the Arctic grows annually. Incidentally, so do the prices of Arctic trips.

The Sahara Desert

The largest desert in the world covers an area of about 9 million km². It consists of rocky terrain and large areas covered with sand dunes. The surface is constantly changing due to winds, and less often very low and rare rainfalls.

The Sahara is a hyper arid desert with almost no vegetation and virtually no rainfall. Most rivers are either dry or exist only seasonally. The exception is the Nile River, which is the main river flowing through the desert. Large mammals like camels, Dorcas Gazelle, antelopes, mouflons, wild donkeys, as well as predators like hyenas, cheetahs, lions, jackals, mongooses can be found in the Sahara.

Arabian Desert

The Eastern or Arabian Desert, as it is also known, is also part of the Sahara desert. The Eastern Desert is more commonly known as the Red Sea Hills.

The desert consists of a mountain range running parallel to the coastline of the Red Sea, wide sedimentary plains extending on both sides of the mountains. Most of the desert is comprised of large moving masses of sand - dunes. Here, strong sand and dust storms, hurricanes, lack of rainfall, strong heat during the day and cold air at night are far from uncommon.

Gobi Desert

Gobi Desert covers parts of northwest and northern China and stretches southly into Mongolia. The Gobi is also known as the 'rain-shadow desert' because it is on the leeward side of the Himalayan Mountains that block rainfall and create a “rain shadow”, trapping clouds coming from the Indian Ocean and does not allow them to reach Gobi.

Most of the desert surface is not sandy but rather bare and naked like a rock. It is a cold desert, and sometimes you can see snow-capped dunes here.

The Kalahari Desert

The desert lies across Botswana, Namibia, and southern Africa. Its territory receives much more precipitation than other deserts in our survey: from 130 to 260 mm a year. The desert is part of the Kalahari basin, which encompasses the delta of the Okavango River and other more humid regions.

Dunes are covered with rare vegetation: grass tussocks, shrubs and deciduous trees which have evolved to cope with the rare rainfall and wild fluctuations in temperature in this area. On the relatively humid north and east sides of the desert there are open forests mainly composed of a species of acacia known as 'giraffe tree'.

Atacama Desert

Atacama Desert is one of the driest regions in the world. Situated near the borders of Peru and Chile, the western part of the desert borders the Pacific Ocean while the eastern part touches Bolivia and Argentina. The area of the Atacama Desert is 105 thousand square kilometers. It usually gets no more than 10 mm of rainfall a year, and in several parts of the desert it doesn't rain for years.

Due to the features of the location, the atmosphere is characterized by thinness, which leads to a high level of radiation. This is considered one of the reasons for the extremely modest flora and fauna of the region. Some parts of the desert are even uninhabited.

Namib Desert

The Namib Desert is the oldest desert on Earth. Located in Namib Naukluft Park, the fourth-largest national park in the world, covering an area of 49,768 square kilometres. The name 'Namib' in the Nama language means 'place of nothingness'.

Namibia stretches along the Atlantic coast through the entire Namibia to the mouth of the Olifants River in South Africa. In the south, it is connected to the southwest part of Kalahari.