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Australia has a wide variety of climates due to its large geographical size. The largest part of Australia is desert or semi-arid. Only the south-east and south-west corners have a temperate climate and moderately fertile soil. The northern part of the country has a tropical climate, varying between grasslands and desert. Australia holds many ...
By far the largest part of Australia is arid or semi-arid. A total of 18% of Australia's mainland consists of named deserts, [20] while additional areas are considered to have a desert climate based on low rainfall and high temperature. Only the south-east and south-west corners have a temperate climate and moderately fertile soil.
Australia is vulnerable to the effects of global warming projected for the next 50 to 100 years because of its extensive arid and semi-arid areas, and already warm climate, high annual rainfall variability. The continent's high fire risk increases this susceptibility to changes in temperature and climate.
On Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia is an area of two square kilometres (0.77 sq mi) called the Little Sahara, a formation of several sand dunes on its south coast. In Victoria, about 375 km (235 mi) west of Melbourne, there is still the Little Desert National Park .
Most desert/arid climates receive between 25 and 200 mm (1 and 8 in) of rainfall annually, [2] [3] although some of the most consistently hot areas of Central Australia, the Sahel and Guajira Peninsula can be, due to extreme potential evapotranspiration, classed as arid with the annual rainfall as high as 430 millimetres or 17 inches.
Australia's size gives it a wide variety of landscapes, with tropical rainforests in the north-east, mountain ranges in the south-east, south-west and east, and desert in the centre. [174] The desert or semi-arid land commonly known as the outback makes up by far the largest portion of land. [ 175 ]
Tourism sign post in Yalgoo, Western Australia. The Outback is a remote, vast, sparsely populated area of Australia.The Outback is more remote than the bush.While often envisaged as being arid, the Outback regions extend from the northern to southern Australian coastlines and encompass a number of climatic zones, including tropical and monsoonal climates in northern areas, arid areas in the ...
Mainland Australia showing the continental Sahul Shelf (light blue) extending to the islands of New Guinea in the north, the island of Timor in the northwest, and Tasmania in the south. The continent of Australia is sometimes known by the names Sahul, Australinea, or Meganesia to differentiate it from the country of Australia, and consists of ...