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What Is a Desert?

The sound of silence is perhaps nowhere as loud as it is in the desert.

In a desert, you can smell the fragrance of a shrub after a rainstorm, and you can feel the dry, hot desert wind on your face. You can see the hole where a gerbil is burrowing, and you can touch the warm sand beneath your feet. But most of the time, in the heart of most deserts, you can hear nothing – nothing but the sound of silence.

What exactly is a desert, anyway? Most scientists agree that a true desert must average less than 10 inches of rain a year. Because desert rainfall is unpredictable, there may be a downpour one day, and then no rain again for 20 years! Most deserts are much hotter in the daytime than at night.

People tend to think of deserts as endless miles of rolling sand, but there are actually a lot of different kinds. Sand covers only about 10 to 20 percent of deserts. Many other landscapes can be found in deserts, including gravel, boulders, mountains, and even ice. Deserts are homes to both nomads (people who wander from place to place) and city dwellers. Camels are found in some deserts and not in others. Deserts have both stark cactuses and vivid poppies.

Come on an exotic adventure to some of the most mysterious and eerily beautiful places on Earth.

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