Sahara (North Africa): world's largest desert
The Sahara, with a size of 8.6 million km², is the world's largest desert, covering large parts of North Africa. Around 4 million people live there. Its maximum length is 4,800 km, running from west to east, and up to 1,200 km from north to south. Sahara covers most of Mauritania, Western Sahara, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Chad, Niger and Mali, and touches Morocco and Tunisia.
Sahara is very dry but there is an annual rainfall in most regions, although just a few dozen millimetres.
Antarctica: world's driest and wettest desert
Antarctica is a land of extremes. It's not inhabited year round by humans because it's simply too freezing cold. In 1983 scientists recorded extreme cold temperatures as low as -129 Fahrenheit. It's also the wettest place on Earth, but simultaneously the driest. The reason it's the “wettest” is not because of rainfall; since Antarctica is covered by 98% ice, it's technically very wet. However since it's also the aforementioned coldest place in the world, it gets very little precipitation – less than 2 inches a year. Which makes Antarctica a desert. A brutally cold ice desert with a massive trench full of even more…ice.
Atacama (Chile): the flourished desert
The Atacama Desert occupies the largest amount of the Chilean territory located north of the 29th parallel. The area located on the coast between Arica and Antofagasta appears in the Guinness Book of World Records as the driest place in the world. Nevertheless, to the south of the Tropic of Capricorn, the desert becomes kinder towards living beings. The coastal mists, "camanchacas", are more abundant south of Antofagasta and bring the humidity necessary for the maintenance of the coastal scenic vegetation. Many plants survive mainly because of the "camanchaca", and the harsh savings of water, in normal dry years, that causes them to delay important functions such as growth,
our planet looks like a watery blue marble from space, but one-third of Earth’s land surface is partially or totally desert.
