in NORTH AMERICA

The Great Basin Records: --The Death Valley which is located in the Great Basin, is the lowest point in the entire North America, it is 86m under sea level. This 'cold' desert is placed above the Canadian border, a complex of deserts. These arid lands which are inside the the Great Basin are the the Grand Canyon of the Conlorado Desert, the Death Valley and Sororan Desert of Arizona, the Mojave, the Yuma and the Chihuahua Desert in Mexico.

The Great Basin is also called the 'Great American Desert' too, for it is filled with a variety of deserts: bolson deserts which are based on dried-out salt lakes and mudflats, hamada-typed deserts which are dominated by gravel-strewn desert plains, deserts which are full of plateaus, and also sandy deserts with forever-moving monster dunes. The foundation of American deserts are younger, compared to other deserts. Flat land here is just over 2 million years old, and mountain ridges which are folded by the earth's crust are thought to be below 5 million years old. This means that the weathering of the rocks formed by fragmentation are still fresh. As the desert is young in age, many kinds of desert plants can be easily found in the Great Basin.

Cacti are especially popular here, those spectacular species like the organ pipe and the prickly pear are here! Apart from a variety of cacti, minor types from other plant families can be found such as the yucca, the Joshua tree. Therefore plant life is the major distinguishing characteristic of the desert.