Deserts of the World “K...-L...-”
for environmental, ecology, and geography educators & classrooms, travelers.

The Kalahari Desert is not a true desert. It is an arid to semi-arid sandy area of 362,500 sq. mi. (900,000 km), consisting of much of Botswana and parts of Namibia and South Africa; the surrounding Kalahari Basin extends further into neighboring Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The Okavango River flows into a wildlife rich delta and after good rains the Kalahara has huge areas of excellent grazing. The 1980s movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy was about a native Bushman's encounter with the western world.

Karakum Desert, east of the Caspian Sea in Central Asia, occupies about 70 percent of the country of Turkmenistan.

The Derweze area of the Karakum Desert is rich in natural gas and oil reserves. A drilling accident in 1971 tapped a cavern filled with natural gas, as it is safer for the environment to let it burn rather than be released into the atmosphere, the area is now known as the Gate of Hell as the gas is still burning in 2011.

Kyzyl Kum is located in the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

The Libyan Desert, also known as the Western Sahara, is an area the size of Texas. It has a varied landscape made up of barren, hard, rocky plateaus called hamada, sand plains, and dunes.

Famous people associated with the Libyan Desert: explorer Ibn Battuta, Ralph Alger Bagnold who wrote The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes, and author and aviator Antoine de Saint Exupery crashed in the northern Libyan desert in 1935.