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Gobi Desert: World
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The total area of the Gobi Desert is around 500,000 square miles (1,295,000 kilometers), making it one of the largest desert regions in the world, after the Sahara. The Eastern region of the Gobi Desert has been used by nomadic herders for thousands of years, and some ecologists have grown concerned about the ecological stability of this region due to overgrazing and exploitation. Another region, the Bayanhongor, has a rich archaeological record of dinosaur fossils, along with a small population of rugged animals and plants.
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The Gobi Desert is of interest to paleontologists around the world because of its rich abundance of dinosaur fossils. But it is unclear what conditions preserve fossils there compared with everywhere else.
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The Gobi desert, one of the world's great deserts, covers much of the southern part of Mongolia. Unlike the Sahara there are few sand dunes in the Gobi; rather you'll find large barren expenses of gravel plains and rocky outcrops. The climate here is extreme. Temperatures reach +40° C. in summer, and -40 in winter. Precipitation averages less than 100 mm per year, while some areas only get rain once every two or three years. Strong winds up to 140 km/h make travel dangerous in spring and fall.
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Presently, two joint Mongolian-Japanese and Mongolian- American expeditions are working in the Gobi desert. Their goal is to re-create the entire ecosystem of the primordial world that flourished some 100 million years ago, to uncover the evolution of dinosaurs and find clues to their sudden extinction - the secret haunting paleontologists all over the world.
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