![]() The Great Basin Desert is a cold desert: both a descriptive and formal term. It takes up most of Nevada, while its fringes lie in northeastern California, southeastern Oregon, southwestern Idaho, and western Utah. To the north, it grades into the semiarid sagebrush and bunchgrass steppes of the Columbia Plateau and Snake River Plain to the south, it drops down into the lower, hotter Mojave Desert. The Great Basin Desert stretches between the Southern Cascades and Sierra Nevada (source of the rain shadow that forms it) on the west and the Rocky Mountains on the east. ![]() This ecological realm covers most, but not all, of the physiographic realm of the Great Basin itself, the biggest component of the Basin-and-Range Province. ![]() But we aren’t going to be considering the dry tundra of Alaska, Canada, or Greenland in this discussion: We’ll stick to the temperate and subtropical zones of North America.) The Great Basin DesertĪ swirling sunset over the largest desert in the United States.Įncompassing the better part of 200,000 square miles, the Great Basin Desert is the largest desert in the United States and the second-largest in North America after the Chihuahuan. (Oh, and before we dive in: The Arctic and Antarctic are polar deserts, getting as little yearly precipitation as many sand-and-cactus ones at lower latitudes. We don’t have the space to go into the nitty-gritty of why North America’s deserts sprawl where they sprawl, but suffice it to say it mainly has to do with rain shadow-casting mountains, distances from moisture sources, the permanent high-pressure zones of the subtropics, and combinations thereof. We should acknowledge that “desert” can be a subjective term more to do with mood-solitude, awe, fear, terror-than rain gauges. Lots of places that don’t meet the technical criteria get slapped with the desert label nonetheless heck, a big chunk of the Great Plains, mainly the mixed-grass and shortgrass prairies, was once called the “ Great American Desert,” though these grasslands are too well-watered to formally qualify. A more precise one calls a desert a place where evapotranspiration (evaporation plus the water given off by plants) exceeds precipitation. There are various ecological and climatological definitions of “desert,” a rough-and-ready one being somewhere that gets 10 inches or less of annual precipitation. We’re going to take a dusty, sandy, squinty-eyed look at the “Big Four” of North American deserts: the Great Basin, Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan, which together cover some 500,000 square miles-from the lonesome sagebrush backlands of Oregon and Nevada, down to the cactus groves of central Mexico. But in beauty, wilderness, and ecological uniqueness they hold their own with any desertscape on Earth. Taken collectively, the deserts of North America are still overshadowed sizewise by the Sahara-at 3.6 million square miles, the greatest (non-polar) desert in the world-as well as the Arabian, the Australian Outback, and several others. Ah, the desert: the “land of little rain”, the house of haboob and flash flood, the thirsty wilderness, the barren void wandered by nomads, exiles, spiritual seekers, bandits, prospectors, and UFO hunters-plus sidewinders, scorpions, tarantulas, and vultures, of course.
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