Desert Future

[ This person is sitting on some very valuable wood ]

Most deserts are rich in resources because they were once fertile land and the dead animals and plants that used to live there had turned into oil and other resources. The Namib Desert has diamonds in it, while there is gold in the Australian Deserts. In Saudi Arabia there are oil fields. Copper, iron, salt and uranium are also found in deserts. Believe it or not, the world's deserts are growing rather rapidly. Every year about 200,000 sq km of the land that borders the deserts become deserts themselves! Desert people speed this up even more by cutting down the trees and letting their pack animals graze on the bordering grasslands. Too much intensive farming can also form a new desert. In the 1930s intensive farming and overgrazing in America's southern states formed a desertlike area of barren land called the Dust Bowl.

DID YOU KNOW?

Every year more than 400 million tons of soil are blown from Africa over the Atlantic Ocean. In 1988 hundreds of small, pink Saharan frogs rained down on a British village!