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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 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.
Pacific Mountain System – the coastal mountain ranges and features in the west coast of the United States. Denali, previously known as Mount McKinley, in Alaska, is the tallest mountain in North America, at 20,310 ft (6,190.5 m). The Grand Canyon, seen here from Moran Point, is among the most visited locations in the country.
A desert is a region of land that is very dry because it receives low amounts of precipitation (usually in the form of rain, but it may be snow, mist or fog), often has little coverage by plants, and in which streams dry up unless they are supplied by water from outside the area. [9]
Over the 4.5 billion-year history of the Earth, tectonic upheavals and colliding plates have raised great mountain ranges while the forces of erosion and weathering worked to tear them down. Even after many millions of years, records of Earth's great upheavals remain imprinted as textural variations and surface patterns that define distinctive ...
The average annual temperature in the desert varies from about 13 to 22 °C (55 to 72 °F), depending on elevation and latitude. The mean annual precipitation for the Chihuahuan Desert is 235 mm (9.3 in) with a range of approximately 150–400 mm (6–16 in), although it receives more precipitation than most other warm desert ecoregions. [3]
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]
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.