LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Gobi Desert: Central Asia
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A windstorm in the Gobi Desert recently sent a wake-up call to two Alaska scientists. At 2 a.m. on April 12th, the cell phones of two volcanologists in Anchorage began to ring, a sign that tiny particles the size of volcanic ash were floating in the air above Cleveland Volcano in the central Aleutian Islands.
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The desert basins of the Gobi are bounded by the Altay Mountains and the grasslands and steppes of Mongolia on the north, by the Tibetan Plateau to the southwest, and by the North China Plain to the southeast. Phonetically, the word Gobi means "very large and dry" in Mongolian. The Gobi is made up of several distinct ecological and geographic regions, based on variations in climate and topography. This desert is Asia's largest.
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The Mongolian word gobi means “waterless place,” and it has become the name for the large desert and semidesert region of Central Asia. The Gobi stretches across vast areas of the Mongolian People's Republic and the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of China.
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This Mongolian Gobi is actually part of the great central Asian desert that stretches from the Chinese occidental border to east Mongolia, one of the biggest in the world ! The Tarim basin, inner Mongolia and the Taklamakan belong to that arid zone explored by Marco Polo, Guillaume de Rubrouck, Prejawlski, Sven Hedin, Ella Maillart and Peter Fleming, who have all followed the mythic Silk Road.
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The Gobi desert in central China has expanded by about 25,000 square miles since 1994 and its sands are now within 160 kilometres (100 miles) of the capital city, Beijing. The capital gets blasted by about half a million tons of sand every year, often reducing visibility to the point where even its soaring skyscrapers are barely visible, air traffic stops and people are forced to stay indoors.
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The Dzungarian Gobi exhibits the ecological influences of the deserts of both Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Vegetation is more plentiful, owing to greater precipitation. In both parts of the protected area, vegetation is characterized by feather grasses, shrubs, and semi-shrubs. Small groves of downy poplar (Populus diversifolia) border oases.
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