Vast, arrid and stretching for miles upon miles, our deserts cover one fifth of the world’s surface and exist on every one of our seven continents. With less than 25 cm of rain a year, these landscapes are often mythologised, and with so few of us venturing into them it’s not difficult to see why.
Stretching across the planet, from Arizona to Western Australia, our deserts might seem devoid of life - but in fact a wealth of plants and animals have adapted over thousands of years to survive in the harshest of environments, learning to thrive in the desert ecosystem. Here, in the scorching deserts that make up so much of our land, we find some of the most surprising creatures that our planet has to offer.
Humans, too, have found ways to live within these tough desert habitats. A billion people, a sixth of the world’s entire population, call the desert home.
In the far north and far south of planet Earth, we find the polar deserts of the Arctic and the Antarctic - an ice-free landscape that at first appears entirely at odds with the sandy deserts of the Middle East or Africa. In polar deserts, gravel plains and bedrock exist for much of the year at temperatures far below zero - a clear example of the contrasts and surprises that we find in this most otherworldly of environments.
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