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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.
For instance, it might be difficult to tell if desertification or desert expansion is the result of climate change or human activity. [19] Desertification in Africa is exacerbated by human factors such as deforestation, overgrazing, and unsustainable farming methods such as monoculture and excessive use of chemical fertilizers.
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.
Humans have long made use of deserts as places to live, [104] and more recently have started to exploit them for minerals [105] and energy capture. [106] Deserts play a significant role in human culture with an extensive literature. [107] Deserts can only support a limited population of both humans and animals. [108]
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, [1] but deserts do not always look like this. [2] 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. [3]
(CNN) — Striking images from the Sahara Desert show large lakes etched into rolling sand dunes after one of the most arid, barren places in the world was hit with its first floods in decades ...
Human impact on the environment. From top left, clockwise: satellite image of Southeast Asian haze; IAEA experts investigate the Fukushima disaster; a seabird during an oil spill; depiction of deforestation of Brazil's Atlantic forest by Portuguese settlers, c. 1820 –25; acid mine drainage in the Rio Tinto; industrial fishing in 1997, a practice that has led to overfishing.
Crawford Lake, which is 79 feet (29 meters) deep and 258,333 square feet (24,000 square meters) in area, was chosen over 11 other sites because the annual effects of human activity on the earth's ...