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Gobi Desert
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[F]or over half a century, access to the riches of the Gobi Desert was only allowed to Soviet scholars. When Mongolia finally opened its borders to the outside world, after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990, American and Japanese explorers were the first to arrive.
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Currently, the Gobi desert is expanding at an alarming rate, in a process known as desertification. The expansion is particularly rapid on the southern edge into China, which has seen 3,600 km² (1,390 sq mi) of grassland overtaken every year by the Gobi Desert. This loss of farmland has caused an estimated $50 billion in losses each year for China's economy. Dust storms, which were once a rarity, are springing up all over China, and could cause even further damage to China's agriculture economy.
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A dust storm blew across the Gobi Desert on March 30, 2007. The same day, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of the storm. This picture shows the storm’s source points in Mongolia: the start of a very pale plume in the north, and the beginnings of thicker, slightly darker plumes in the south. All the plumes flare out as they sweep across the Gobi in a counter-clockwise direction toward China. Just south of the dust plumes, opaque white clouds follow a similar path.
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The Gobi ... draws packs of paleontologists and archaeologists who love nothing better than to grub around in the desert dust looking for dinosaur remains. And it's a veritable dinosaur graveyard, with some fossilized remains lying only inches from the surface. If a dinosaur femur gets your juices flowing or if you're a lover of horses, history, open spaces, and spectacular scenery, the country they call the 'big sky land' is the place to go.
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Deserts can be either hot such as the Australian Desert or cold such as the Gobi Desert. As with all biomes, the desert climate is determined by geographic conditions. Geographic conditions such as location, high atmospheric pressure, and proximity of mountain ranges determine just what type of desert it is.
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This summer Coyle's team was asked by the Smithsonian Institution to identify the gender of mummified remains-thought to possibly be members of a murdered native family-gathered from a cave in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. In a separate case, while the Gobi research continued, the team tried unsuccessfully to extract DNA from skeletal remains that had been buried in the U.S. Then, Coyle remembered how readily the DNA was extracted from the remains dried for hundreds of years in the Gobi Desert. Theorizing that moisture and embalming preservatives in the U.S. bones might be an impediment to DNA extraction, she baked a bone sample at 70 degrees Celsius (158 degrees Fahrenheit) for 72 hours and again tried extracting a DNA sample. It worked.
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Gobi Desert