About Gobi Desert, Mongolia

The Gobi Desert is a vast zone of desert and desert steppe covering almost 30% of the Mongolian territory and north eastern China. The desert stretches about 3,000 mi/4,830 km along both sides of the Chinese border.

Desert is often imagined as a lifeless desert, similar to African deserts. In reality, most part of the Gobi Desert is a land of steppes and many camel breeders inhabit this zone as rich in wildlife and vegetation. It has herds of Bactrian camels (with two humps), wild horses and donkeys, as well as leopards, mountain sheep and ibexes.

There is a lot of variety within the Gobi Desert, from wildlife parks and mountains to canyons with dramatic rockfaces. Once the site of an ancient inland sea, the area has dried up and then eroded over the eons, providing paleontologists with magnificent specimens of dinosaur fossils. The Mongolian say that there are 33 different Gobi from which sandy desert occupies 30% of the total area. Climate is extreme with +40° in summer and -40° in winter and very few precipitation.

The Mongolian Government established the Great Gobi desert Strictly Protected Area in 1975 and the United Nations designated, in 1991 the Gobi desert as fourth largest Biosphere reserve in the world.