Dust from China's Taklamakan Desert helps seed clouds over the western US
Winds carry Taklamakan dust across the Pacific, where its K-feldspar grains are especially good at triggering ice in clouds over the western United States. The desert itself, slightly smaller than Germany, is now ringed by a 3,050 km green belt and a railway loop.
The Taklamakan fills much of the Tarim Basin in southern Xinjiang, walled in by the Kunlun to the south, the Pamirs to the west, the Tian Shan to the north and the Gobi to the east. It covers 337,000 km², ranking 15th among the world's deserts, inside a basin about 1,000 km long and 400 km wide. Scholars agree makan comes from Arabic for place, but takla is disputed: it may derive from Arabic tark, to abandon, or mean place of ruins, and folk etymology renders the name Place of No Return.
Lying in the Himalayan rain shadow and far from any sea, it has a cold desert climate, with winter lows well below −20 °C and summer highs up to 40 °C. Spring is peak dust-storm season, especially in the south. Its dunes constantly move with the wind, burying grassland and homes; one Qira County farmer recalled waking to find sand had sealed his door and buried his crops overnight, forcing him to leave.
Water is scarce, so Silk Road caravans skirted the desert along northern and southern branches, resting at oases fed by mountain water: Kashgar, Yarkand, Khotan and Niya in the south, Kuqa and Turpan in the north, Loulan and Dunhuang in the east. Buried ruins show Tocharian, Hellenistic, Indian and Buddhist influences, and mummies up to 4,000 years old have been found. Uyghurs arriving around the 9th century assimilated the Tocharians, and the monk Xuanzang in the 7th century and Aurel Stein in the 20th both explored the region.
China has built two cross-desert highways, including the Tarim Desert Highway from Hotan to Luntai, and the Golmud–Korla line crosses the sands. The Green Great Wall afforestation effort, launched in 1978, had completed a 3,050 km belt of poplar, saxaul and red willow around the desert by 2024, and in 2023 China announced plans to drill about 11 km into the crust here.
Source: Taklamakan Desert
