Random Desert Name Generator

How this random desert generator works

Press Generate and you get a desert and the region it sits in. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.

The Sahara. The Atacama. The Taklamakan. Dasht-e Lut. The Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter, which is exactly as empty as it sounds.

Every one of them fails to be the largest desert on Earth, and the reason is the most interesting fact about the subject.

The two biggest deserts on Earth are cold

Ask anyone to name the largest desert in the world and they will say the Sahara.

The Sahara is the largest hot desert. It covers something like 9.2 million square kilometres of North Africa, and it is the third largest desert on the planet.

The largest is Antarctica. About 14 million square kilometres, roughly fifty percent bigger than the Sahara, and it is a desert by every definition anybody uses. The interior receives somewhere between fifty and a hundred millimetres of water a year, all of it as snow.

The second largest is the Arctic, at about 13.7 million square kilometres.

Neither appears on most lists of deserts. They are left out because "desert" carries a picture with it, and the picture has sand in it, and a picture is not a definition.

The ice sheet in Antarctica is thick not because a great deal falls, but because almost nothing melts. Snow that landed a hundred thousand years ago is still there. A desert can accumulate, so long as it never lets anything go.

A desert is dryness, not heat

The definition most authorities use: a place that receives no more than about 250 millimetres, or ten inches, of precipitation in a year.

That is the whole test. Not temperature. Not sand. Not camels. Precipitation, and precipitation counts rain, snow, sleet, mist and fog. Anything that falls.

Run the test on Antarctica and it passes so comfortably that the McMurdo Dry Valleys, ice-free patches of bare rock kept clear by ferocious winds, are among the driest places on the planet. NASA has used them as a stand-in for Mars.

Run the test on the Gobi and it passes for a different reason. The Gobi is cold. It sits in the rain shadow of the Himalayas, and its landscape is mostly rock rather than sand.

Run it on the Atacama and it passes more emphatically than anywhere outside the poles. Parts of it have gone years with no measurable rainfall at all.

Three deserts, three reasons, one number.

Deserts are mostly not made of sand

Dunes are the picture and the picture is a minority.

National Geographic's own pages put the sand-covered fraction of the world's deserts at about ten percent in one place and about twenty percent in another. Which tells you two things. The number is small, and it is contested.

The rest is rock plateau, gravel pavement, salt flat, and ice. The Colorado Plateau is desert. The Black Rock Desert is a dry lakebed you can drive a car across at speed. Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia is a salt flat so level it is used to calibrate satellites.

Meanwhile deserts cover more than a fifth of the Earth's land surface, and roughly a sixth of humanity lives in them.

There are five ways to make a desert

Deserts are not scattered randomly. They are where they are for reasons, and there are five of them.

• Subtropical. Air rises at the equator, dumps its rain as tropical downpours, then descends dry at around 30 degrees north and south. That descending air is the Sahara, the Arabian, the Kalahari, the Great Victoria.
• Rain shadow. Wet air rises over a mountain range, drops its water on the near side, and comes down the far side wrung out. The Gobi behind the Himalayas. The Patagonian behind the Andes.
• Coastal. A cold ocean current chills the air above it so it cannot hold moisture, then that air blows onshore. This is the Atacama and the Namib, both of which sit on a coastline and are among the driest places on Earth.
• Interior. Simply too far from any ocean for weather to reach. The Taklamakan.
• Polar. Cold air holds almost no water vapour, so nothing falls. Antarctica and the Arctic, the two largest of all.

Generate a desert and you can usually work out which of the five it is from where it sits. That is a better geography exercise than memorising a list.

The Sahara was green, and will be again

Between roughly 9,000 and 3,000 BCE the Sahara was not a desert. It had a milder, wetter climate, and climatologists call that period the Green Sahara.

People lived there. The archaeological evidence is everywhere in what is now one of the emptiest places on Earth: rock paintings, graves, tools, the shorelines of vanished lakes. There were animals to hunt and water to drink.

These humid periods are not a one-off. They come round roughly every 21,000 years, driven by slow wobbles in the Earth's orbit that shift where the monsoon rains fall. Between them come dry spells like the one we are in.

So the Sahara is not permanent, and neither is its absence. On a long enough timescale a desert is a phase a place goes through.

Ways people actually use this

• Geography lessons. Generate five and ask which of the five formation types each one is. It is the rare quiz question that can be reasoned out rather than remembered.
• Deciding what to read about. Most people know the Sahara and nothing else. The Dasht-e Lut recorded some of the hottest ground temperatures ever measured from orbit.
• Worldbuilding. Pick the formation mechanism before you pick the desert. A rain shadow desert has mountains on one side and that changes everything else.
• Travel shortlists, if you like being somewhere with nothing in it.
• Settling the Antarctica argument. It will come up. You are now ready.

Getting more out of the filters

• The continent is in every entry, so Contains doubles as a region filter. Type Africa, Asia, North America, South America.
• Type Desert and look at what stays behind. The Rub' al Khali and Salar de Uyuni do not need the word.
• Starts with matches the desert's name, since that comes first in every entry.
• Type Great for the ones somebody thought were worth an adjective.

Questions people ask

What is the largest desert in the world?

Antarctica, at around 14 million square kilometres. The Sahara is the largest hot desert. If somebody says the Sahara without the word "hot", they have skipped the definition.

What makes somewhere a desert?

Receiving no more than about 250 millimetres of precipitation a year. Temperature does not enter into it, and neither does sand.

Is Antarctica really a desert?

Yes, and it is not a technicality. Its interior receives fifty to a hundred millimetres of water a year, all as snow. The ice sheet is thick because almost nothing melts, not because a lot falls.

Which is the driest desert?

Parts of the Atacama in Chile are the driest places outside the poles, with locations that have gone years without measurable rain. Within Antarctica, some of the Dry Valleys are drier still.

How much of a desert is sand?

Far less than the pictures suggest. Estimates run between about a tenth and a fifth of global desert area. The rest is rock, gravel, salt and ice.

References

1. Desert, National Geographic Education
2. Deserts, National Geographic Education
3. Antarctica, National Geographic Education