gobi-desert

Ask most people to name the world's largest desert and they'll say the Sahara. They're wrong — and the reason why reveals what a desert actually is. A desert is defined by how little water falls from the sky, not by sand or heat. By that definition the single largest desert on Earth is Antarctica: a 14-million-square-kilometre sheet of ice that receives less precipitation than parts of the Sahara. The biggest deserts on Earth are frozen.