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Great Basin Desert

#9 in World

United States

1 / 12
© NASAPublic Domain
Area
492K km²
Coordinates
40.0000, -117.0000
Category
deserts

Overview

North America's largest desert - a cold, high-altitude basin.

About

The Great Basin Desert is part of the Great Basin between the Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch Range in the western United States. The desert is a geographical region that largely overlaps the Great Basin shrub steppe defined by the World Wildlife Fund, and the Central Basin and Range ecoregion defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and United States Geological Survey. It is a temperate desert with hot, dry summers and snowy winters.

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More about Great Basin Desert

Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Great Basin Desert, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Read full article