The Sahara desert is the largest hot desert in the world, covering approximately 3,500,000 square miles of North Africa. It should be noted that the Antarctic Desert is in fact, larger than the Sahara. Antarctica is a polar region and is considered a desert because it receives very little precipitation. However, the Antarctic Desert often goes unmentioned when it comes to deserts because it is not a hot desert. The Sahara is often mentioned as the largest desert in the world, but also sometimes as the third largest, after the Antarctic and Arctic deserts.
Covering an area of approximately 900,000 square miles, the hyper arid Arabian Desert is the largest eco-region of the Arabian Peninsula. The desert is spread across countries that include Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman and Yemen. The Arabian Desert has 700-foot dunes and is also home to the Rub'al Kali Desert. It is an important area because it is rich in oil and natural gas.
The Gobi Desert covers an area of 500,000 square miles and is located in the northwest part of China and much of the southern part of Mongolia. The desert has an extreme climate, ranging from 40 degrees Celsius in the summer to minus-40 degrees Celsius in the winter. The land is mostly barren expanses of gravel plains and rocky outcrops, with very few sand dunes. Great Gobi National Park is home to Gobi bears and the last remaining wild two-humped camels.
The Patagonian Desert is the largest desert in South America, covering approximately 260,000 square miles, and is located in Argentina and a small area of Chile. It is a cold winter desert, experiencing around seven months of winter and five months of summer each year, with the temperatures rarely exceeding 12 degrees Celsius. A number of animals inhabit the Patagonian Desert, such as the pygmy armadillo, Patagonian weasel, puma, Patagonian gray fox and desert iguana. The area is sparsely populated by humans, except for a few farmers surviving off the raising of livestock like sheep and goats.
The Rub'al Khali Desert covers approximately 250,000 square miles, encompassing most of the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula. The desert covers more than the combined land areas of the Netherlands, Belgium and France and is one of the largest continuous bodies of sand in the world. It is one of the driest regions in the world and although the desert is mostly unexplored, the world's largest oilfield -- al-Ghawar -- was discovered there in 1948.
