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Sand dune stabilization is a coastal management practice designed to prevent erosion of sand dunes. Sand dunes are common features of shoreline and desert environments. Dunes provide habitat for highly specialized plants and animals, including rare and endangered species .
The Gobi Desert is the fastest expanding desert on Earth, as it transforms over 3,600 square kilometres (1,400 square miles) of grassland into wasteland annually. [58] Although the Gobi Desert itself is still a distance away from Beijing, reports from field studies state there are large sand dunes forming only 70 km (43.5 mi) outside the city.
The terrain is covered with sand dunes with heights up to 250 metres (820 ft), interspersed with gravel and gypsum plains. [3] [5] The sand is reddish-orange due to the presence of feldspar. [5] There are also brackish salt flats in some areas, such as the Umm al Samim area on the desert's eastern edge. [5]
A large dune complex is called a dune field, [7] while broad, flat regions covered with wind-swept sand or dunes, with little or no vegetation, are called ergs or sand seas. [ 8 ] [ 9 ] [ 10 ] Dunes occur in different shapes and sizes, but most kinds of dunes are longer on the stoss (upflow) side, where the sand is pushed up the dune, and have ...
Many people think of deserts as consisting of extensive areas of billowing sand dunes because that is the way they are often depicted on TV and in films, [54] but deserts do not always look like this. [55] Across the world, around 20% of desert is sand, varying from only 2% in North America to 30% in Australia and over 45% in Central Asia. [20]
The Great Sand Dunes National Park has the highest sand dunes in North America. There are 30 square miles of dune field with five massive dunes – the tallest being 750 feet.
The Atacama Desert (Spanish: Desierto de Atacama) is a desert plateau located on the Pacific coast of South America, in the north of Chile.Stretching over a 1,600-kilometre-long (1,000-mile) strip of land west of the Andes Mountains, it covers an area of 105,000 km 2 (41,000 sq mi), [2] which increases to 128,000 km 2 (49,000 sq mi) if the barren lower slopes of the Andes are included.
A satellite image of the Sahara, the world's largest hot desert and third largest desert after Antarctica and the Arctic. Desert greening is the process of afforestation or revegetation of deserts for ecological restoration (biodiversity), sustainable farming and forestry, but also for reclamation of natural water systems and other ecological systems that support life.