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All About Deserts
Desert biomes receive less than 10 inches of precipitation per year. Deserts are found on every continent of the world, including Antarctica! Antarctica is a specific type of desert biome called a polar desert, but it is still considered a desert because it only gets about 50 mm of precipitation a year. It is considered the largest desert in the world! The driest desert in the world is the Atacama Desert in South America. NASA scientists did some studies to see how much rain it has gotten and discovered that there was hardly any rainfall between 1570 and 1971, meaning that it went almost 400 years without rain! The hottest desert in the world is the Sahara Desert in northern Africa. It can have temperatures of up to 117 degrees Fahrenheit! The Sahara Desert is also one of the largest deserts on Earth. It has an area of over 3.5 million miles, which is almost the same size as the country of Brazil! Most people think of deserts as hot places, but a more accurate definition is that deserts have very extreme temperatures. Many deserts can experience days that are 100 degrees Fahrenheit and nights that are only 25 degrees Fahrenheit. This is because deserts are so dry - without clouds and evaporated water to insulate, or trap the heat of the day, they get very cold at night. Desert plants are adapted to live in the harsh conditions of the desert. Saguaro cacti soak up water from infrequent rains and store it in their stems. Mesquite grass will curl their leaves in the daytime to save water. Yucca plants have long, thin leaves to direct water to the middle of the plant so that they don’t lose any of the precious moisture. Delicate succulents have a waxy, dusty coating on their leaves to protect themselves from burning in the sun - it’s like they make their own sunscreen!
