One-third of Earth's land surface
is partially or totally desert.
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Antarctica is the largest desert in the world.
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The word "desert" comes from the Latin "desertum" which means "an abandoned place".
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It snowed in the Sahara Desert in 1979.
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Sand from the Sahara is blown by the wind all the way to the Amazon, recharging its minerals. The desert literally fertilizes the rainforest.
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Rain has never been recorded in parts of Chile's Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth.
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There were once camels roaming in the deserts of Arizona.
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The Sahara desert stretches farther than the distance from New York to Los Angeles.
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Google hired a camel to create the Street View of a desert.
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Alaska has a sand desert with dunes over 150 feet (45 m) high.
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The Lut Desert in Iran is the hottest place on earth.
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About 46,000 square miles of arable land turn to desert every year due to climate change and practices such as forest clear-cutting.
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Desertification threatens the livelihoods of more than 1 billion people in 110 countries, the U.N. says.
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Only about 15% of the Sahara Desert is covered in sand.
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More than 1 million people live in the Atacama desert, the driest place on earth, extracting water from aquifers and snowmelt streams and raising llamas and alpacas.
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There is a secret swimming pool in the Mojave Desert that anyone who finds it can use.
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In six hours, the world's deserts receive more energy from the sun than humans consume in a year.
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The world record for crossing the Sahara Desert by bicycle was set in 2011 by a British man who made the 1,084-mile journey in 13 days and 5 hours.
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The Tree of Tenere was considered the most isolated tree on Earth, being the only one for 250 miles in the Sahara Desert, until a drunk driver hit it in 1973.
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Temperatures in the Namib desert can reach as high as 60°C during the day and below 0°C at night.
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