The Gobi Desert: The World's Largest Cold Desert Is Growing by 3,600 Square Km Every Year

A Desert Defined by What It Is Not

The Gobi confounds popular expectations of what a desert looks like. The word "desert" summons images of sand dunes baking under a tropical sun, but the Gobi is cold, remote, and dominated not by sand but by bare rock and gravel plains. It covers approximately 1.3 million square kilometers across southern Mongolia and northern China — an area larger than Peru — and sits at elevations of 1,000 to 2,000 meters on the Mongolian Plateau, far above sea level.

Winter temperatures in the Gobi regularly drop below -30°C, and the extreme cold combined with the region's distance from moisture-bearing air masses creates an arid environment with less than 200 millimeters of annual precipitation over most of the desert's area. This combination of cold and dryness defines the "cold desert" category, distinguishing the Gobi from hot deserts like the Sahara where extreme heat is the dominant characteristic.

The Gobi is not entirely devoid of sand dunes — the Khongoryn Els dunes in southern Mongolia, some reaching 300 meters, are a notable landscape feature. But the vast majority of the desert is stony terrain: flat gravel plains and exposed rock pavements scoured by wind-driven sand and extreme temperature cycling.

The Fossil Record of the Gobi

The Gobi has yielded some of the most important paleontological discoveries of the 20th century. American Museum of Natural History expeditions to the Gobi in the 1920s, led by Roy Chapman Andrews, returned with the first confirmed dinosaur eggs, an extraordinary collection of Cretaceous-era dinosaur fossils, and specimens of early mammals. The discovery helped establish the central Asian steppe as a major center of vertebrate evolution during the Cretaceous period.

The Flaming Cliffs (Bayanzag) in the Mongolian Gobi, where Andrews made his most significant finds, continue to yield fossils. The arid conditions that preserve fossils so well — minimal precipitation means less chemical weathering, and exposure means erosion gradually reveals buried specimens without destroying them — make the Gobi one of the world's richest fossil sites for Late Cretaceous terrestrial animals.

Velociraptors, Protoceratops, Oviraptors, and numerous other species known primarily from Gobi specimens have become central to the scientific understanding of how dinosaurs evolved, behaved, and ultimately gave rise to birds.

3,600 Square Kilometers Lost Each Year

The Gobi's expansion is driven by desertification — the degradation of previously productive land at the desert's margins. The processes involved are complex and interrelated. Overgrazing by livestock in the semi-arid grasslands of the Mongolian steppe and Inner Mongolia removes vegetation that stabilizes soils and prevents wind erosion. Climate change is reducing precipitation and increasing temperatures in the region, further stressing the vegetation. Population pressure and agricultural demand encourage cultivation of fragile dryland soils that, once their thin organic layer is disturbed, lose fertility rapidly.

The expansion of the Gobi into formerly productive grassland has direct consequences for the nomadic herding communities of Mongolia and Inner Mongolia whose livelihoods depend on those grasslands, and for the agricultural regions of northern China where dust storms originating in the expanding desert cause significant economic damage. Beijing, approximately 900 kilometers from the Gobi's eastern edge, regularly experiences dust storms that significantly degrade air quality, close schools, and disrupt transportation.

China has planted tens of billions of trees in an effort to create a "Great Green Wall" — a belt of shelterbelts and planted forests along the desert's southern edge — since the 1970s. The program, called the Three-North Shelterbelt Program, has achieved significant tree coverage over large areas, though its effectiveness in halting desertification has been questioned by researchers who note that many plantations use single-species monocultures poorly adapted to local conditions that can create their own ecological problems.

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