Where is gobi located

Think again. Here are 15 Facts about the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert Climate. The Gobi Desert Geography. The Gobi Desert History. The Gobi Desert Animals.

The Gobi Desert: Camels make up a significant proportion of life in this vast expanse of land. The Gobi Desert Population. Have the opportunity to stay like a local! The Gobi Desert Tour. Why join a Gobi Desert Tour? Why visit the Gobi Desert in the first place? How can I join a Gobi Desert tour?

Back to blog. Get our newsletter: Submit. In its northern regions, it has the typical Gobi barren, rocky landscape. The plateau may receive as much as six inches of rainfall in a year, although the precipitation varies widely both in place and time. In the southern, drier part, it may receive no rain at all for years. The plateau does have a few rivers near its eastern edge, and it has numerous oases fed primarily by mountain snowmelt in its basins. As in the Eastern Gobi Desert Steppe, the plateau's temperatures vary widely with the seasons.

It has an extraordinary diversity of wildlife, with some species native only to the plateau. Its plant community varies from minimal vegetation in the stone-covered areas to scattered shrubs and grasses in the most arid areas to forests along the rivers to reed beds in the low-lying wetlands. Gobi Lakes Valley -- Situated to the north of the Alashan Plateau, the long and narrow Gobi Lakes Valley, covering about 53, square miles, lies in the midst of several mountain ranges.

Averaging about to feet in elevation, the valley has a few sand dunes interspersed with salt marshes, and it has several large, but often dry, lakes fed by intermittent rivers that rise in nearby mountains. The valley receives some two to eight inches of rain in an average year. It has dry, windy summers with comparatively moderate temperatures, and it has moderately cold winters, with temperatures that sometimes approach zero degrees Fahrenheit.

Its wildlife community includes species adapted not only to the arid landscape but also to the wetlands, where water birds, amphibians and various reptiles have found a home. Similarly the plants include species adapted to both the desert steppe and the wetlands environments.

Junggar Basin Dzungarian Basin -- A ,square-mile expanse west of the Alashan Plateau, the Junggar Basin, somewhat like the Gobi Lakes Valley, lies in the midst of several mountain ranges, with broad openings to the northwest.

Its elevation ranges from about to feet above sea level. Its arid heartland receives about three to four inches of precipitation in an average year, supporting enough vegetation to stabilize most of its sand dunes. There are fossils throughout the Gobi Desert. Some are as old as , years old. One of the first people to discover them for the Western world was the American paleontologist, Roy Chapman Andrews. He discovered the first known fossil dinosaur eggs. He is also allegedly the inspiration for Indiana Jones.

The Gobi is classified as a Cold Winter Desert. At times you can see frost and snow on the dunes and valleys. It shares this designation with other famous deserts like Patagonia and the Great Basin Desert in America. However, the Gobi is larger than both those deserts combined.

By now, you may not know where the Gobi Desert is located. Despite its size, it only crosses two countries. The Gobi straddles both Mongolia and China. The Gobi covers three provinces in Mongolia, and three in China. They can range as low as minus In the summer, the Gobi can reach temperatures as high as 37 C in summer. You should also pack some sunscreen because, the sun gets closer at Northern latitudes, leaving you more prone to skin damage. Contrary to what you may expect, the Gobi Desert gets most of its meagre rainfall in the summer.

It gets less than mm of rain every year. Dornogovi itself has fourteen distinct towns, with the largest, Sainshand, having a mere 20, inhabitants as of , a density of 8. Still, this area is only SouthGobi province meanwhile is even less inhabited. With its 15 subdivisions, the largest, the regional capital of Dalanzadgad has a mere 12, inhabitants within its kilometre area.

Believe it or not, even a desert can have a whole lot of history to it. From its formation over millions of years to its human history, the Gobi Desert has experienced a lot and been a huge part of a lot. We might as well have a deep-dive into some of that. Of course we could really go back indefinitely with this. The land that makes up the Gobi desert was at one point the cosmic debris that floated about the universe in pre-Earth times.

God knows exactly how any of that came to be. Anyways, the earliest thing that it seems can be agreed upon is that the arid climate that characterised the region began around 50 Ma. Ma is a geology term , describing years past in the millions. The collision of tectonic plates and the growth of the Himalayas in this period is what contributed to the blocking of water vapour, thus causing desertification. This process was, of course, incredibly slow and the modern landscape was only eventually developed by 2.

Some estimates even put the Badain Jaran desert part of the Gobi desert at a mere 1. The full formation of the desert took many millions of years and as judged by the more recent desertification, is an ongoing process. Some of this silt has been determined as the result of wind-weathering or the violence of shifting tectonic plates.

Others are likely the result of the no-longer existing Paratethys ocean, which at one point flooded large parts of the Gobi desert region before receding between 40 to 30 Ma. Subsequent periods saw infrequent flooding and formings of other seas which may have lasted for thousands of years each, but which barely appear as a blip on the historical radar when looking back this long. The regionalism of much of this does a lot to explain the diversity of the landscape in the Gobi desert.

Okay, so all that pre-history stuff is pretty confusing and vague, but it gives you a rough idea of how the Gobi desert became what it is, right? And sure enough, it sat right between Mongolia and China, two of the towering imperial powers of the ancient world!

Written history of the Gobi desert seems to be quite hard to come by. Marco Polo described it being so long that it would take a year to travel from end-to-end and at least a month at its narrowest point.

Despite this, Marco Polo already describes trade routes through the desert being well established by this stage. The empire was in a period of turmoil and disintegration by this time, but such trade routes absolutely existed. Perhaps the earliest evidence of human activity in the desert is rather recently discovered.

In , evidence surfaced of remnants of an unknown portion of the Great Wall of China which extended partially into Mongolia proper. Up until this point, the belief was that while the great wall extended through the adjacent Ordos desert in China, it never moved into the Gobi. Radiocarbon dating of portions of the wall estimate that construction occurred between the early 11th and late 12th centuries, consistent with the Great Wall.

While it is currently not proven, it certainly makes a compelling case. From these periods onwards, the Gobi desert served as part of the Silk Road trade route, connecting Mongolia with China and thus with the rest of the world for trading, prompting some permanent settlements around the few oasis to supply such journeys. This later led to European exploration of the region in the late 17th century, gradually expanding until an explosion of activity in the late 19th century, no-doubt as a result of European military incursion into China.

Exploration later continued under the Chinese, Mongolian and Soviet governments before spiking once more in the s when major fossil finds were recorded in the region. One last curious historical anecdote is an incident of an American weather station based in the Gobi desert being caught in the Japanese invasion of China. Which anyone who watched the Avatar TV show may recognise. The story was later exaggerated and turned into a movie, Destination Gobi. Well, perhaps this has made you want to visit.

As for us, we at least grace part of the Gobi desert as part of our Mongolia Naadam Festival tour! You should check it out! See author's posts. Area Like I said, the complete area of the Gobi desert is , square miles, but the desert itself is very much not a square.

Ecoregions of the Gobi Desert The Gobi Desert can be broadly divided into five ecoregions, varied by differing climate and topography.