Even in China’s largest, driest, and hottest desert, vegetation sprouts in the spring.
In the local Ugyur language, China’s Taklamakan Desert roughly translates to: “You go in, but you won’t come out.” It is the country’s hottest, driest, and largest desert—about the same size as Germany. Roughly 85 percent of the Taklamakan consists of shifting sand dunes, some of which soar up to 200 to 300 meters (650 to 900 feet) in height. The world’s second largest moving-sand desert is also prone to massive dust storms.
But even in this dry, dangerous desert nicknamed the “Sea of Death,” plant life sprouts in the springtime. The images above show a portion of the Taklamakan Desert by the oasis town of Hotan on February 23 and April 29, 2020, as vegetation sprouted on the landscape. The images were acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.
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Image via NASA Earth Observatory
