Taklamakan Desert

Taklamakan Desert Latest News

For decades, China has been planting trees and other vegetation around the edges of the Taklamakan Desert, one of the world’s largest and driest deserts, in an effort to stop desertification and hold back shifting sand.

About Taklamakan Desert

• The Taklamakan Desert, located in southwest Xinjiang in northwest China, is one of the world’s largest sandy deserts. 
• It sits right in the middle of the largest inland basin in China—the Tarim Basin. 
• The desert area extends about 960 km from west to east, and it has a maximum width of some 420 km and a total area of approximately 320,000 sq.km.  
• It is the world’s second-largest shifting-sand desert, and 85% of its total area is composed of crescent-shaped dunes.
• It is flanked by two towering mountain ranges–Tien Shan to the north and Kunlun mountain ranges to the south.
• It also has the Pamir Mountains and Tian Shan (ancient Mount Imeon) to the west and the famed Gobi Desert to the east.
• There is a gradual transition to the Lop Nur basin in the east; in the south and west, between the sandy desert and the mountains, lies a band of sloping desert lowland composed of pebble-detritus deposits. 
• The place has a typical continental climate with strong gusts of wind, very little precipitation, and a significant shift in temperature from daytime to nighttime and vice versa.
• The continuously shifting nature of the sand in the desert has extended Taklamakan to about 100 km southward during the last thousand years. 
• There are also small mountain ranges in the desert as well as the Tarim River that flows through its Northern edge. 

News: MC

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