Welcome to the second annual GSS Desert Week! In time-honoured tradition, we’ll mostly be posting about deserts. For about a week!

Death Valley National Park, part of the greater Mojave Desert, is an expansive 13,630 square kilometre natural preserve located on the border between California and Nevada. As its name would suggest, the valley has a climate that is most inhospitable to human settlement, but attracts over 700,000 visitors annually. It also holds the triple honour of being the hottest, driest, and lowest (in altitude) place in North America.

The valley’s floor receives an average annual rainfall of around 4 cm and lies predominantly below sea level. Its unique location between the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Amargosa Range allows temperatures to regularly rise above 40°C in the summer months. In fact, the hottest temperature ever observed in the Western Hemisphere was recorded at Death Valley¹ in 1913 when the mercury hit 56.7 degrees Celsius!

Badwater Basin, pictured below, is a broad salt flat located at the southern end of the park. At 85.5 metres below sea level, it is the lowest point in the valley and in all of North America!

Given its low altitude, the basin drains a large area and can actually become a full-blown lake on rare occasions. Above right we see a Landsat-5 satellite image from back in February of 2005 when unusually high rainfall filled the basin for several days creating a salt lake.

Just a few miles up the valley you can clearly make out the colourful rock formations that make up another Death Valley attraction known as Artist’s Palette.

Along a stretch of road known as Artist’s Drive, a rich spectrum of colours can be seen in a relatively isolated space. The variation of red, pink, yellow and green hues are caused by the oxidation of different metals within the rock.

Toward the northern end of the park, Death Valley’s diverse topography can be seen in many different stages of wind erosion.

On the left, Zabriske Point overlooks an extreme erosional landscape composed of sediment from a prehistoric lake bed. The Mesquite Sand Dunes, some as tall as 40 meters, are pictured to the right and located at the northern edge of Death Valley National Park. Due to their relative proximity to Los Angeles, the dunes have been a generic desert backdrop for many Hollywood films, including the Star Wars series.

So there you have it, vast natural wonders and a week-long vacation condensed into a few paragraphs. Should you care to see it for yourself, or if you just want to find out more, Wikipedia (as always) has loads of information, as does the US National Parks Service.

Thanks to hexodus, Rob Smith, Keith, Beej and Jillian Johnson.

Welcome to the second annual GSS Desert Week! In time-honoured tradition, we’ll mostly be posting about deserts. For about a week!

The beautiful Wadi Rum is a mere 720 square km desert valley located in the southern part of Jordan. Once submerged under the Red Sea, it is now home to the native Bedouin people and is a favourite spot for foreign travellers looking to explore the vast desert wilderness. Wadi Rum was also the set of the classic film, Lawrence of Arabia the story of T.E. Lawrence, a British officer during WWI.

Wadi Rum is surrounded by some spectacular mountains of sandstone and granite, which cater to all kinds of adventurous activities if you decide to take a trip there. Although the Bedouin¹ were traditionally a nomadic tribe, today most have built homes and adopted a more stationary lifestyle – with many living off the revenue generated by local tourism.

It wasn’t until the 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia that Wadi Rum became widely known to Western society. In the film, British officer T.E Lawrence spends time in Wadi Rum during the Arab revolts of WWI, helping the Arabs fight against the Turks and eventually conquer the Ottoman Empire. While the movie is a bit misleading, Lawrence did at least spend some time in Wadi Rum during the war. Nevertheless, because of the amazing scenery, Wadi Rum was an excellent choice of location.

Check out Wadi Rum’s official site, or Wikipedia for more info.

Welcome to the second annual GSS Desert Week! In time-honoured tradition, we’ll mostly be posting about deserts. For about a week!

While Canada is generally thought of as a land of ice and snow, it is home to one arid desert – the Osoyoos or Nk’Mip Desert of British Columbia.¹

Surrounding the community of Osoyoos, and the lake of the same name, this area of the Okanagan is home to desert plants and animals not found anywhere else in the country. It is one of the hottest and driest parts of Canada year-round, and some believe that Osoyoos Lake is the warmest in the world (though there are several competing claims for that title.)

The desert is characterised by barren hillsides and plains, bordered by lush green fields and orchards which survive with heavy irrigation.

For a small desert, it is surprisingly well endowed with visitor centres. The Osoyoos Desert Society has its Centre to the north-west of town, while the Nk’Mip Indian Band’s Desert Cultural Centre is “an architectural marvel sensitively constructed into a hillside” on the other side of the lake. At both, you can learn about the local flora and fauna through static displays and a network of trails

The Nk’Mip Band have also managed to carve a golf course out of the desert, with an associated resort and spa, while nearby is an estate of vineyards producing some of the wines for which the Okanagan is renowned.

Some distance out of town, the desert even has a salt lake, called – not surprisingly – Spotted Lake. The spots appear when water evaporates, leaving rich mineral deposits behind.

Panoramio has a good selection of pictures of Canada’s Desert.

Welcome to the second annual GSS Desert Week! In time-honoured tradition, we’ll mostly be posting about deserts. For about a week!

The Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, is renowned across the US for exhibits like the largest cat complex in North America, the world’s largest nocturnal exhibit and indoor swamp, and the world’s largest indoor rainforest.

The reason we’re here today however, is that under the world’s largest glazed geodesic dome we find the world’s largest indoor desert, which is home to plants and animals from the Namib Desert, the Australian Outback, and the Sonoran Desert.

The dome has two interior levels covering 7,800 sq m (84,000 sq ft), and rises nearly 42 m (137 ft) above ground. True to the form of the best geodesic domes, there are no internal supports, with the structure’s 1,760 triangles providing all the strength it needs to remain standing.

Dubious claims to fame aside, the zoo does fantastic work in animal conservation and research, and was voted Best Zoo in America 2004 by Reader’s Digest.

Thanks to Juicio.

There’s more information at the Henry Doorly Zoo Official site and Wikipedia page.

Welcome to the second annual GSS Desert Week! In time-honoured tradition, we’ll mostly be posting about deserts. For about a week!

Even by Saharan standards, the Ténéré region of northern Niger is pretty desolate: a vast sea of sand, broken only by the occasional rocky outcrop, where barely an inch of rain falls each year. So it’s something of a surprise to see a huge picture of a DC-10 among the dunes.

The story behind this striking image is a tragic one: it is a memorial to UTA Flight 772, which was blown up by a suitcase bomb in the skies above this spot in 1989, killing 170 people¹. An investigation concluded that Libyan terrorists were to blame for the explosion, which occurred 46 minutes after the aircraft took off from N’Djamena International Airport in Chad, en route to Paris. (The flight had originated from Brazzaville, the capital city of Congo.)

The memorial was created in 2007, to mark the 18th anniversary of the disaster, by Les Familles de l’Attentat du DC-10 d’UTA, an association of the victims’ families. Financed by a compensation fund paid to the victims by the Libyan government, it was constructed by 100 people working largely by hand under the desert sun.

The life-size silhouette of the aircraft lies inside a circle more than 200ft in diameter, created using dark stones set into the sand. Surrounding this circle are 170 broken mirrors, representing those who died, and arrows marking the points of the compass. At the northern point, part of the right wing of the DC-10 has been erected as a monument, with a plaque commemorating the victims.

The association’s website (in French) includes a moving video of the crash site – still littered with perfectly preserved debris – and numerous photographs of the construction of the memorial. (These are large PDF files, but are well worth downloading as they give an idea of the stark beauty of the region as well as the impressive size of the memorial.)

Thanks to Tom Van Steen.