Gobi Desert

• 1. Introduction

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  The Gobi Desert takes its name from the Mongolian word Gov', which simply means dryland. Mongolians once used it for every waterless stretch of their high plateau, whatever the ground looked like. The Chinese cousin of that word, gēbì, is narrower. It names rocky semi-deserts rather than seas of sand, and that difference shapes everything about this place. The Gobi is a cold desert and grassland region in southern Mongolia and North China, and it ranks as the sixth-largest desert on Earth.

  Such a bare label hides a puzzle. Where does a desert like this actually begin and end, and who gets to decide? What do its basins hold, and what kind of people crossed it before anyone wrote the crossings down? And the Gobi is not standing still. Why is it moving, and can anything be done about it?

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• 2. A Desert Without Edges

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  Measured from southwest to northeast, the Gobi runs about 1,600 kilometres, and from north to south it spans about 800 kilometres. Its area comes to roughly 1,295,000 square kilometres. The desert is at its widest in the west, along the line joining Lake Bosten and Lop Nor, between 87 and 89 degrees east.

  The long stretch of desert begins at the foot of the Pamirs, at 77 degrees east. It ends at the Greater Khingan Mountains, between 116 and 118 degrees east, on the border of Manchuria. To the north it is hemmed in by the foothills of the Altay, Sayan and Yablonoi ranges. To the south it meets the Kunlun, Altyn-Tagh and Qilian ranges, which form the northern edges of the Tibetan Plateau.

  Some ground is counted as Gobi purely by habit. A large area east of the Greater Khingan range, between the upper waters of the Songhua and the upper waters of the Liao-ho, belongs to the desert by conventional usage. At the other end, some geographers and ecologists cut away the western area, around the Tarim basin in Xinjiang and the basins of Lop Nor and Hami. They call that piece a separate desert named the Taklamakan.

  Broadly defined, the Gobi divides into five dry ecoregions. The easternmost is the Eastern Gobi desert steppe, which covers 281,800 square kilometres and reaches from the Inner Mongolian Plateau in China north into Mongolia. West and southwest of it lies the Alashan Plateau semi-desert. North of that sits the Gobi Lakes Valley desert steppe, wedged between the Gobi Altai range and the Khangai Mountains. Farther west comes the Dzungarian Basin semi-desert, between the Altai and the Tian Shan, and the fifth ecoregion is named for the Tian Shan range itself. Each of these has its own character, and the ground in the east is the place to start.

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• 3. Extremes of Cold

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  Frost and occasional snow settle on the dunes of the Gobi, which surprises anyone who pictures deserts as hot. The desert sits on a plateau roughly 910-1,520 metres above sea level, and it also lies far to the north. Together those facts keep temperatures low.

  About 194 millimetres of rain fall in a typical year, and most of it arrives in summer. In winter, wind carries extra moisture to parts of the desert as snow blown off the Siberian Steppes. The air itself swings between brutal poles, from around -40 C in winter to as much as 45 C in summer. In Alxa, in Inner Mongolia, July temperatures climb as high as 37 C.

  A single day can bring a 35 C change in temperature, which makes the Gobi a climate of rapid reversals. Two air systems pull the region in different directions. Southeast monsoons reach the southeastern parts, and plant growth in the southern and central Gobi varies because of that rain.

  The far north gets no such help. The Siberian anticyclone is at its strongest in winter, and the Siberian-Mongolian high pressure cells keep the northern Gobi cold and dry enough that little can grow. Their legacy is icy dust and snowstorms in spring, in early summer and again in early January. The ground those storms sweep across is far from uniform, as the next landscapes show.

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• 4. Salt, Sky and Sand

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  Between Ulaanbaatar and the small lake of Iren-dubasu-nor, the eastern surface is heavily eroded. Broad flat basins lie between groups of flat-topped mountains only 150-180 metres high, and the basin floors sit mostly between 900 and 1,000 metres above sea level. Through the central parts, trees and shrubs are completely absent. In places farther south, beds of loess five to six metres thick are exposed in dry valleys.

  Trade has threaded across this ground for thousands of years. One route runs 960 kilometres from Kalgan, at the Great Wall, to Ulaanbaatar. Another covers 670 kilometres from Jiuquan to Hami, and a longer one links Hami with Beijing across 2,000 kilometres.

  In the Alashan Plateau, sometimes called the Little Gobi, the Mongols have a name for the sands. Where bare dunes run on for hundreds of kilometres without a break, they call them Tengger, which means sky. The explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky described the region this way: "Topographically," he said, "it is a perfectly level plain, which in all probability once formed the bed of a huge lake or inland sea." He reasoned from its flatness, its hard saline clay and the salt lakes in its lowest parts.

  The Dzungarian Basin lies under the Tian Shan, the Heavenly Mountains. Rivers born from snow and glaciers break through the barren foothills and fan out into marshes with dense reed-beds. Westerners and Chinese call this terrain a desert, but the Mongols call it a gobi, a land of thin herbage better for camels than cows. One description claims that Gobi mutton is the most aromatic in the world.

  Farther south rises a great swelling of land that the Mongols call the Ghashuun-Gobi, the Salt Desert. It is 130-160 kilometres across, and its highest range stands at 2,700 metres. Grigory Grum-Grshimailo, who named that range Tuge-tau, assigned it to the Choltagh system. Sven Hedin would give it to the Kuruk-tagh instead, and the two never settled the matter.

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• 5. Life on Dry Ground

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  Roughly 30 species of lizard are spread across the southern Mongolian border of the Gobi, and they are especially well suited to its climate. Other residents are found almost nowhere else. They include black-tailed gazelles, marbled polecats, wild Bactrian camels, Mongolian wild ass and sandplovers. Snow leopards, Gobi bears and wolves visit now and then.

  The most common plants are drought-adapted shrubs, among them gray sparrow's saltwort and gray sagebrush. Low grasses such as needle grass and bridlegrass fill in the gaps. In the Eastern Gobi, one small plant matters beyond its size. The taana wild onion is the main browse for many herd animals, and Mongolians claim it gives camel airag, a fermented milk, its proper hazelnut-like notes.

  Livestock have taken a toll on this thin cover, and the number of shrubs has fallen because of grazing. In Mongolia, goats raised by nomadic herders for cashmere wool have degraded the grasslands. Trampling by livestock and off-road vehicles harms the ground too, and the effect is greater in the eastern Gobi, where heavier rainfall can sustain animals.

  Several large reserves now protect parts of the desert. They include Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park and the Great Gobi A and Great Gobi B Strictly Protected Areas. Beneath the surface of the same desert lies a very different kind of record.

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• 6. Travelers and Bone Hunters

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  In 1923, twenty-six dinosaur eggs, each averaging 23 centimetres in length, were uncovered in the Gobi. They were the first dinosaur eggs ever found. The Nemegt Basin, in the northwestern Gobi in Mongolia, is noted for similar treasures, including early mammals and prehistoric stone implements about 100,000 years old.

  The Gobi was long known to outsiders only in fragments, because information came from individual travelers following their own itineraries. Jean-François Gerbillon crossed between 1688 and 1698, and Eberhard Isbrand Ides followed in 1692-1694. Lorenz Lange traveled in 1727-1728 and again in 1736. Nikolai Przhevalsky made journeys in 1870-1872 and 1876-1877.

  The pace picked up near the end of the nineteenth century. Pyotr Kuzmich Kozlov traveled in 1893-1894 and 1899-1900, and Vladimir Obruchev in 1894-1896. Sven Hedin went in 1897 and again in 1900-1901. Grigory Potanin, Béla Széchenyi and Lajos Lóczy are also on the list of the most important contributors.

  In the 1920s, Roy Chapman Andrews led several palaeontological expeditions to the Gobi for the American Museum of Natural History. In the 1960s Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska led Polish-Mongolian expeditions. Long before any of them arrived, though, people already lived in the desert. Its earliest residents left only stone, bone and clay.

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• 7. The Oasis Peoples

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  Little is known about the earliest habitation of the Gobi, and Lisa Janz has proposed three stages for it, named Oasis I, Oasis II and Oasis III. Oasis I matches the Mesolithic, from 13,500 to 8,000 calendar years before present. People began using oases then, and they left micro blades, small milling stones, small tools and plain, low-fired pottery.

  Oasis II matches the Neolithic, from 8,000 to 5,000 calendar years before present. Oases were used extensively. Adzes and axes appear, along with honeycomb-imprinted and corded pottery. Around the start of this period a warm wet phase began. By 7,500 years before present, lake levels in the Western Gobi had reached their peak, with meadow steppe around the lakes. At Ulaan Nuur there may have been shrubby woodlands along the water.

  Oasis III matches the Bronze Age, from 5,000 to 3,000 calendar years before present. The tool kit now included bifacially flaked arrowheads, knives and grinding stones. People also left copper slag, bone beads and clay spindle whorls. Bronze Age herder burials have been found, along with Karasuk bronze knives and Mongolian deer stones.

  Climate soon turned against them. A period of desertification ran from 5,000 to 4,500 years before present, and increasing dryness between 3,500 and 3,000 years before present brought a decline in human habitation. Petroglyphs found in southern Mongolia in 1997 are among the traces of that earlier life. Today the region is inhabited mostly by Mongols, Uyghurs and Kazakhs, and it faces a new round of drying.

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• 8. A Desert on the Move

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  The southern edge of the Gobi pushes into China, where 3,600 square kilometres of grassland are overtaken every year. Between 1996 and 2016, dust storms grew more frequent and did further damage to China's agricultural economy. In some areas, though, desertification has been slowed or even reversed.

  At the northern and eastern boundaries, the line between desert and grassland keeps shifting. The cause is mostly conditions before the growing season, which set the rate of evapotranspiration and so the pace of plant growth. The longer-term expansion is blamed mostly on people, through deforestation, overgrazing and the depletion of water resources, along with climate change.

  China's answer began in 1978 with the Three-North Shelter Forest Program, also called the Green Great Wall. The program plants aspen and other fast-growing trees across some 36.5 million hectares in 551 counties in 12 provinces of northern China. It has met with some success. The planting is scheduled to continue through 2050, so its final results will not be known for decades.

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