The Gobi is a cold rock desert, not endless soft dunes
Spanning southern Mongolia and northern China, the Gobi is the world’s sixth-largest desert, covering roughly 1,295,000 square kilometres. Its Mongolian name means dryland, and much of it is bare rock and gravel rather than sand; winters can fall below minus 30 degrees, and in 1923 it yielded the first dinosaur eggs.
It stretches about 1,600 km from southwest to northeast and 800 km north to south, widest in the west between Lake Bosten and Lop Nor. Conventional borders run from the Pamir foothills to the Greater Khingan and from the Altay, Sayan, and Yablonoi ranges south to the Kunlun and Altyn-Tagh, and some geographers split the western sector into separate deserts. The Chinese term gēbì refers specifically to rocky semi-desert. Plateau heights of about 910 to 1,520 metres keep it cold, with frost and occasional snow on the dunes.
Southern Mongolia has recorded minus 32.8 °C, while Alxa in Inner Mongolia reaches 37 °C in July, and temperatures can swing 35 °C within a day. Winter lows average minus 21 °C and summer highs 27 °C. Most of the roughly 194 mm of yearly precipitation falls in summer; in winter the Siberian anticyclone keeps the air bone-dry.
Fossils made it famous: 26 dinosaur eggs averaging 23 cm long were unearthed in 1923, and Mongolia’s Nemegt Basin has yielded early mammals and stone tools about 100,000 years old. Black-tailed gazelles, marbled polecats, wild Bactrian camels, and Mongolian wild asses live here, with occasional snow leopards, Gobi bears, and wolves. Trade routes, some thousands of years old, cross it, including the 960 km track from Kalgan at the Great Wall to Ulaanbaatar.
The desert is spreading, fastest on its southern edge, where China loses about 3,600 km² of grassland a year. Overgrazing by herders’ goats, deforestation, water depletion, and climate change drive the advance, and dust storms grew more frequent between 1996 and 2016. China’s Three-North Shelter Forest Program, the Green Great Wall, has planted trees since 1978 and is meant to run to 2050.
Source: Gobi Desert
