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The McMurdo dry valleys of Antarctica, which lack water (whether rain, ice, or snow) much like a non-polar desert and even have such desert features as hypersaline lakes and intermittent streams that resemble (except for being frozen at their surfaces) hot or cold deserts for extreme aridity and lack of precipitation of any kind. Extreme winds ...
Because of its arid climate and large population, water is critically important in the state of Arizona. Most drinking water is drawn from surface water sources, including Bureau of Reclamation dams and the Central Arizona Project diversion. Much of this surface water is from the Colorado River. Groundwater serves to augment surface water.
The Sonoran Desert is a desert located in the Southwestern United States and northwest Mexico. It is the second largest hot desert in North America. Its total area is 120,000 sq mi (310,000 km 2). The Mojave Desert is the hottest desert in North America, located primarily in southeastern California and Southern Nevada.
Because the forest ecosystem is distinct from a typical desert, some authorities, such as the World Wildlife Fund, separate the mountains of the Great Basin desert into their own ecoregion: the Great Basin montane forests. [17] Many rare and endemic species occur in this ecoregion, because the individual mountain ranges are isolated from each ...
Rain that reaches the ground, or snow that melts, quickly evaporates in the dry desert environment. Some of the water that does not evaporate sinks into the ground to become ground water. The remaining water flows into streams and collects in short-lived lakes called playas on the valley floor and eventually evaporates.
The Great Basin Desert is part of the Great Basin between the Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch Range in the western United States.The desert is a geographical region that largely overlaps the Great Basin shrub steppe defined by the World Wildlife Fund, and the Central Basin and Range ecoregion defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and United States Geological Survey.
Steamboat Mountain and other desert mesas or buttes provide seeps and springs that serve as water sources for small streams, such as Jack Morrow Creek. While the basin's interior waters are intermittent, the desert is bounded to the west by the Green River and to the east by the North Platte River .
Rainfall averages between 4–12 inches per year, and the desert's most widely known inhabitant is the saguaro cactus, which is unique to the desert. [13] [14] It is bounded on the northwest by the Mojave Desert, to the north by the Colorado Plateau and to the east by the Arizona Mountains forests and the Chihuahuan Desert. [15]