Why is there a desert and how is it formed?

The unique feature of the desert is the large temperature difference between day and night. This sudden change in temperature puts pressure on the area's stone structures, causing them to crack.

This process, combined with the desert's constant dry winds, continues to cause erosion. This repeated over many millennia forming so much sand in the desert as we see it now.

Essentially, the sand will sort itself by size. Larger and heavier pieces of sand will lie at the bottom, while finer, silty sand will lie on the surface, where it will continue to support wind weathering.

Thus, sand in the desert is formed thanks to a combination of wind weathering and typical desert weather conditions with large temperature changes between day and night. However, not all deserts have a lot of sand, they can be covered with gravel or rocks depending on the formation conditions.

Why not use desert sand to build houses?

Although there is an abundant supply, desert sand has a size, shape, and composition that are not suitable as a construction material, with poor durability and load-bearing capacity, so it is hardly used in construction.

The unique feature of the desert is the large temperature difference between day and night. This sudden change in temperature puts pressure on the area's stone structures, causing them to crack.

This process, combined with the desert's constant dry winds, continues to cause erosion. This repeated over many millennia forming so much sand in the desert as we see it now.

Essentially, the sand will sort itself by size. Larger and heavier pieces of sand will lie at the bottom, while finer, silty sand will lie on the surface, where it will continue to support wind weathering.

Thus, sand in the desert is formed thanks to a combination of wind weathering and typical desert weather conditions with large temperature changes between day and night. However, not all deserts have a lot of sand, they can be covered with gravel or rocks depending on the formation conditions.

Although there is an abundant supply, desert sand has a size, shape, and composition that are not suitable as a construction material, with poor durability and load-bearing capacity, so it is hardly used in construction.

Under normal wind speed conditions, almost all gravel is concentrated at a height of less than 2 meters. Someone did an interesting experiment in the southern part of the Great Takla Makan Desert, and found that when the wind speed was 5.7 m/s, up to 39% of gravel only flew to a height of less than 10 cm, of which the extreme large almost flying close to the ground.

Therefore, when the wind blows sand and pebbles past, the bottom of the isolated lava block is constantly abraded and destroyed by many sand pebbles, destroying it relatively quickly. As for the upper part, because the wind carries relatively little gravel and sand, the abrasion happens more slowly. Day by day, a "stone mushroom" gradually forms with a large rough upper part and a small lower part.

If the lower part of the lava is soft and the upper part is hard, then even where it is not abraded by sand and wind, only under the destructive effect of other natural forces, the lava will be carved into stone mushrooms.

Interesting Sahara Desert

The Sahara Desert has an area of ​​more than 9 million square kilometers, approximately the size of the United States and China. The desert covers most of North Africa, covering large areas of 12 countries: Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Mali, Eritrea, Niger, Sudan, Tunisa, Western Sahara. Scientists discover that the Sahara desert is expanding. From 1962 to present, this desert has expanded by nearly 650,000 square kilometers. Although the terrain is vast, the Sahara Desert is not the largest desert in the world. If ranked with Antarctica and the North Pole, Sahara only ranks 3rd.