If you've always dreamt of the freedom of a nomad's life, then the Gobi is the place for you. Granted, life will be hard at times, but your successful efforts to stay alive will be rewarded by wide open spaces in which to roam and the clear sight of the stars in the utter darkness of the desert night sky. The nomads of this region do not own land as those of us in the west do, though they do recognize traditional camping and grazing spots - summering in the mountains, and wintering in the plains or lower hills.

The word gobi denotes a desert or a waterless place but doesn't really mean anything by itself. The Mongolians have many descriptive words for types of gobi, like the Eskimo and Scandinavians with their words for snow. There are supposed to be thirty-three Mongolian words for gobi - such as gravel, sand, bare earth, rock, mountain, dune, watering place, and those describing various types of vegetation. The ancient Gobi was more like an East African savannah - long grasses and some trees, with lakes and marshes. Successive waves of drought turned it into the more barren land it is today.

A Mongolian legend explains the origin of the Gobi. Once upon a time, a Mongolian chieftan's town was about to be attacked by a Chinese army. This khan was also a magician and as he fled, he cursed his former home, causing the land to dry up behind him, leaving nothing for the Chinese, a non-labor intensive version of the scorched earth tactic.

The Gobi region occupies about one third of the area of Mongolia, extending from southern Mongolia into northwestern China. The Gobi usually divided into five main ecoregions. In the east the land is predominately grassy steppe with ponds and salt pans. The Alashan plateau in the southernmost part of Mongolia, stretching down into China, is semi-desert bounded by mountain ranges to the north, southeast and southwest. The narrow flat Gobi Lakes Valley to the southwest is desert steppe, but has salt marshes and lakes fed by rivers flowing from the Kangai Mountains, though during droughts the rivers do not always carry enough water to keep some of the lakes from drying up for part of the year. The Junggar Basin in northwestern China lies between the Altai mountains and the Tian Shan range and includes semi-desert and steppe. Beyond the Tian Shan mountains lies Taklimakan Desert, one of the largest shifting sand deserts in the world. Blocked from storms on all sides by mountains and lacking drainage, large salt deposits have formed here, though the Tarim River crosses the basin from west to east, and there are some freshwater springs most years which are fed by melting snow from the mountains.

The overwhelming impression one gets when first arriving in the Gobi is that of a barren brown land. But it is far from empty. Nomads and wildlife traverse its tracks and on closer inspection, only about three percent of the land is the sand that most people associate with the word desert. Most of the land is steppe, which is a treeless plain somewhat like a prairie, only with short grasses instead of long. There are also xerophilous shrubs which have adapted to the arid conditions, and lots of rocks. The word steppe is a Russian word denoting a flat and arid land, not quite a desert, but too dry to support forests. Temperatures vary from over forty degrees celsius in summer to forty below in winter.

Much of the Gobi has a gravelly surface. The underlying soil is loess, which is an unstratified loamy yellowish brown dirt, produced by ancient glacial movement which ground the rocks into an almost flour-like consistency. Being so light, this soil is prone to wind erosion and can become as deep as one hundred meters in places, as well as causing substantial alterations to the landscape from year to year. The huge duststorms in the Gobi have caused this loess to blow east and south into China over the centuries, which surprisingly has added to the fertility of a place with regular rainfall. So when the Mongols overran China, they were in a sense reclaiming their own land.

There is water in the Gobi, if you know where to find it. There are some thirty-six springs in the Gobi National Park that have a combined water flow of around 77,500 liters per hour, and around five thousand wells in the southern Gobi province. But even in the driest parts there are oases which can support the indigenous wildlife as well as herds and crops, though Mongolians have traditionally looked down on farming as being Chinese, a definite slur. Genghis Khan is supposed to have warned that if his people ever gave up being nomads that they would cease to be Mongols.

This lack of water has given rise to reports for centuries that the Mongols were by nature a filthy people. Arab historians in the thirteenth century and William of Rubrick in the fourteenth century all remarked how one could tell when the Mongols were approaching by the smell. But if one has to choose between drinking the little available water, or washing with it, necessity dictates the choice.

Besides the extremes of temperature, the scarcity of water, and the duststorms, a visitor to the Gobi needs to worry about earthquakes. One of these in the southern Gobi in 1957 registered at least 7.9 on the Richter scale. While this sounds extreme to us who live in more populated areas, the difference is that there aren't any cities or roads to destroy, and very few people for these cataclysms to disturb.

It is interesting that the Mongol and Chinese histories did not bother to record the advances of the Mongolian cavalry though the Gobi, though sometimes the routes can be inferred from the towns that were mentioned. From the historical evidence, it took about a week for an army of several thousand men, along with their extra horses, baggage trains and herded food animals, to cross 650 km of the Gobi east into China. Apparently this trip was so commonplace that it was more like a modern-day commute to a job than a hazardous expedition.



No discussion of the Gobi Desert would be complete without mentioning the spectacular dinosaur finds.

Roy Chapman Andrews was an American who excavated in the Gobi in the 1920s. He identified numerous new species of dinosaurs and discovered the first fossilised specimens of dinosaur eggs. Research continues today with modern techniques, such as in this 1998 Expedition sponsored by the National Geographic Society.

Sources:
Man, John. Gobi: Tracking the Desert (Yale University Press, 1999).
Paul Greenway, Robert Storey, and Gabriel Lafitte. Lonely Planet: Mongolia (Lonely Planet Publications, 1997).
Gobi Desert-wikipedia
The Encyclopedia of Earth

NASA satellite image in the public domain, adapted by Feiyan Zhou.
Dinosaur egg image by Bouette, used in accordance with the GNU Free Documentation License

Map of Mongolia