Question

The World's largest cold desert is:
1. Atacama
2. Sahara
3. Antarctica
4. Greenland

Answer 1

Correct Answer - Option 3 : Antarctica

Antarctic Desert is the Word's largest cold desert.

Antarctic Desert:

• In terms of sheer size, the Antarctic Desert is the largest desert on Earth, measuring a total of 13.8 million square kilometers.
• Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, and most isolated continent on Earth, and is considered a desert because its annual precipitation can be less than 51 mm in the interior.
• It’s covered by a permanent ice sheet that contains 90% of the Earth’s freshwater.
• Only 2% of the continent isn’t covered by ice, and this land is strictly along the coasts, where all the life that is associated with the land mass (i.e. penguins, seals, and various species of birds) reside.
• The other 98% of Antarctica is covered by ice which averages 1.6 km in thickness.
• There are no permanent human residents, except research stations.

Atacama desert: 

• The Atacama Desert is a desert plateau in South America covering a 1,600 km strip of land on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes Mountains.
• The Atacama Desert is the driest nonpolar desert in the world
• This is the only true desert to receive less precipitation than the polar deserts and the largest fog desert in the world.
• Both regions have been used as experimentation sites on Earth for Mars expedition simulations.

Sahara desert:

• The Sahara is a desert on the African continent. With an area of 9,200,000 square kilometers.
• It is the largest hot desert in the world and the third-largest desert overall, smaller only than the deserts of Antarctica and the northern Arctic

Greenland desert:

• In northern Greenland, precipitation is so low, that many areas can be called Arctic deserts.
• In particular, Peary Land has precipitation levels of only about 25 to 200 mm per year, all as snow, and was not covered by glaciers during the most recent ice age.