14 Surprising Facts About Desert Everyone Must Know

A desert consists of barren land unsuitable for plant and animal life to sustain. These landscapes receive little or no rain and offer harsh living conditions for a normal ecosystem. Only a handful of distinct plants and animals can sustain their life in deserts. Around 33% of the land surface of the world is bone-dry or semi-parched. A desert can either be hot or cold.

Today, the team of FactWish is offered an opportunity to provide an amazing collection of facts about deserts around the world. Lets get started.

1. The largest polar desert in the world is Antarctica. On the other hand, the Sahara Desert is the world’s largest subtropical desert.

2. The Sahara Desert once faced snowfall in 1979. Being a hot subtropical desert it is strange, isn’t.

3. The size of deserts on Earth is continuously increasing year after year.

4. Desert doesn’t mean they have extreme temperatures. There are various places where the temperature can be more extreme than deserts. A place is declared a desert if does not hold support for vegetation.

5. The first discovery of dinosaur eggs was found in Gobi desert in 1923. The desert is located on outskirts of Himalayas.

6. Gobi desert is the fastest growing desert in the world. The tall mountains in Himalayan range block the clouds to rain over the desert.

7. Even though the Sahara desert has extremely harsh condition to sustain life for a majority of species. However, the wind takes off sand from the desert and deposit in the Amazon forests which enriches the minerals of the forest.

8. Google once hired a camel to capture 360-degree Street View of the Arabian desert.

9. The deserts of the Earth absorbs more solar energy in just 6 hours than entire human population consumes in an entire year.

10. The Namib desert is the oldest desert in the world. World’s tallest sand dunes are also located in Namib desert with some sand dunes reaching up to 300 meters.

11. The most dangerous threat in deserts is “Killer Bee”. They are a variety of African honey bees that move in swarms of up to 900,000 bees together sufficient enough to 100,000 humans.

12. The Antarctica desert is the only desert area that covers an entire continent. It is also the world’s highest desert.

13.  Kalahari desert is home to world’s most venomous snake known as “Taipan Snake”. A bite of Taipan can inject enough venom to kill more than 80 humans.

14. In 2011, a world record was created for crossing the entire Sahara desert with a bicycle crossing 1084 miles in just 13 days and 5 hours.