Superlatives · deserts
The Most Extreme Deserts and Drylands on Earth
10 places · every one real, mapped, and worth the trip
Deserts hold more world records than any other kind of landscape: the biggest, the driest, the hottest, the oldest. This list gathers the drylands in the atlas that hold a genuine superlative — each one an extreme of the planet made visible.
'Desert' is used broadly here to take in sand seas, salt flats, and dune fields as well as classic sand desert. Every one is a real, reachable place, with honest notes on the heat, the distances, and what to carry.
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The Sahara (Erg Chebbi) Largest hot desert
Merzouga / Erg Chebbi, southeastern Morocco
The Sahara is the largest hot desert on Earth, sprawling across North Africa — the Moroccan dunes at Erg Chebbi are its most accessible, camel-and-camp corner.
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Rub' al Khali Largest sand sea
Southern Arabian Peninsula
The 'Empty Quarter' of Arabia is the largest continuous body of sand in the world, with dunes rising hundreds of metres above the gravel plains of Oman.
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The Atacama Desert Driest nonpolar desert
Northern Chile
Parts of Chile's Atacama have gone years without measurable rain — the driest place outside the poles, and one of the clearest skies on Earth for stargazing.
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McMurdo Dry Valleys The driest of all
Victoria Land, Antarctica
A desert is defined by precipitation, not heat — and no significant precipitation has fallen on these Antarctic valleys for close to two million years.
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Lut Desert Hottest surface on record
Kerman & Sistan provinces, southeastern Iran
Iran's Dasht-e Lut has recorded some of the highest land-surface temperatures ever measured by satellite, its wind-carved ridges baking under a merciless sun.
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Sossusvlei & Deadvlei Among the oldest · tallest dunes
Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia
The Namib is one of the oldest deserts on Earth, and Sossusvlei's rust-red dunes are among the tallest anywhere — best at dawn from atop 'Big Daddy'.
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Salar de Uyuni Largest salt flat
Altiplano, southwestern Bolivia
Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world — a blinding white plain that becomes a perfect mirror when a thin film of water covers it.
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The Gobi Desert Largest desert in Asia
Southern Mongolia (and northern China)
The vast cold desert of Mongolia and northern China, a land of gravel steppe, singing dunes, and some of the richest dinosaur fossil beds on the planet.
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The White Desert
Farafra, Western Desert, Egypt
Egypt's Western Desert is studded with surreal chalk formations sculpted by wind into mushrooms and towers, glowing white against the sand.
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Lençóis Maranhenses
Maranhão, Brazil
Not a true desert at all: a Brazilian field of brilliant white dunes that fills, after the rains, with thousands of turquoise freshwater lagoons.
Extreme is the point here: several of these are genuinely dangerous to underestimate — carry far more water than you think you need, travel with local guides where advised, and check conditions before setting out.
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