Deserts of Asia

Last reviewed on 2026-10-01.

Asia contains the largest continuous belt of dry land on Earth. The Arabian Desert is the biggest in Asia, at roughly 2.3 million km², and the Gobi of Mongolia and northern China is the second, at around 1.3 million km². Between them lie the sand seas of Iran, Central Asia, the Tarim Basin and the Thar. Some are scorching subtropical deserts; others are cold deserts where winter temperatures fall far below freezing. This guide explains why Asia is so dry, then works through the main deserts from west to east.

Why Asia has so many deserts

Three separate mechanisms produce Asia’s deserts, and several deserts owe their dryness to more than one of them.

Subtropical high pressure. Around 20–30° north of the equator, air that rose in the tropics sinks back towards the surface. Sinking air warms and dries as it descends, suppressing cloud and rain. This is the same belt that produces the Sahara, and in Asia it gives rise to the Arabian Desert, the deserts of southern Iran and the western edge of the Thar.

Continentality. Asia is so large that its interior lies thousands of kilometres from the nearest ocean, and most moist air has rained itself out long before it gets there. The point on land farthest from any sea, often called the Eurasian pole of inaccessibility, lies in north-western China, not far from the Dzungarian and Tarim basins. Central Asian deserts such as the Karakum and Kyzylkum, and much of the Gobi, are dry above all because they are so far inland.

Rain shadows. Mountains force moist air upwards, where it cools and drops its rain on the windward side, leaving the lee side dry. The Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau form the greatest barrier of all: they block the summer monsoon from reaching the interior, so that the wet slopes of India and Nepal give way, across the mountains, to the arid Tibetan Plateau, the Taklamakan and the Gobi. The Tarim Basin, home of the Taklamakan, is ringed by the Tian Shan, the Pamir and the Kunlun, and in Iran the Alborz and Zagros wall off the central plateau from the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. For the ranges themselves, see Mountain ranges of Asia.

Asia’s deserts are also more varied than the popular picture of rolling dunes. Many are stony plains of gravel and bare rock; others are salt flats, clay pans or mixtures of all three. Geographers often divide them into hot deserts, where winters are mild, and cold deserts, where winters are severe — a distinction that matters far more in Asia than on any other continent.

Asian deserts compared

Desert boundaries are drawn differently by different sources, so the areas below are rounded and approximate. Several of these deserts are subdivisions of larger ones: the Rub’ al Khali lies within the Arabian Desert, and the Cholistan is an extension of the Thar.

The Arabian Desert and the Rub’ al Khali

The Arabian Desert covers most of the Arabian Peninsula, centred on Saudi Arabia and reaching into Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq. It is a classic subtropical desert, with summer temperatures that regularly pass 45°C in the interior, and much of it is gravel plain and rocky plateau rather than sand.

Its southern third is the Rub’ al Khali, the “Empty Quarter”, generally described as the largest continuous body of sand in the world. Its dunes run in long ridges and great star-shaped mounds, some well over 200 metres high. It was crossed by outsiders only in the 1930s, and it remains almost uninhabited, although oil and gas fields lie beneath its northern edge. Further north, the Nafud and the narrow arc of the Dahna are separate sand seas within the same desert.

On the eastern edge of the peninsula, the Wahiba Sands (now officially the Sharqiya Sands) of Oman form a compact sand sea of long, parallel dunes between the Hajar Mountains and the Arabian Sea. They are small by Arabian standards but well studied, and Bedouin families still live around their margins.

The Syrian Desert and the Negev

North of the Arabian Peninsula, the Syrian Desert stretches across eastern Syria, north-eastern Jordan, western Iraq and northern Saudi Arabia. It is mostly flat, stony steppe-desert, with dark basalt fields in its western part, and it has long been crossed by caravan routes linking the Mediterranean with Mesopotamia; the ancient city of Palmyra grew up at an oasis in its midst.

The Negev covers the southern half of Israel, more than half the country’s land area. It is a rocky desert of plateaus and canyons rather than dunes, best known for its makhteshim, large erosion craters such as Makhtesh Ramon. Its northern fringe is semi-arid and has been widely farmed with the help of irrigation.

The deserts of Iran

The central plateau of Iran is enclosed by mountains on almost every side, and its two great deserts sit in the basin between them. The Dasht-e Kavir, or Great Salt Desert, lies in the north. Much of it is a crust of salt over soft mud, which makes large parts of it dangerous or impossible to cross.

The Dasht-e Lut, to the south-east, is one of the hottest places on Earth. Satellite measurements of land surface temperature (the temperature of the ground itself, not the air) have recorded readings above 70°C there, among the highest ever measured anywhere. Its landscape includes towering wind-sculpted ridges known as kaluts and fields of dunes, and it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016.

The Thar and Cholistan

The Thar, or Great Indian Desert, covers much of the Indian state of Rajasthan and extends into Sindh and Punjab in Pakistan. It sits at the dry western edge of the monsoon, receiving some rain in most summers, and it is one of the most densely populated deserts in the world, with cities such as Jaisalmer, Jodhpur and Bikaner in India. The Indira Gandhi Canal now carries water from Punjab’s rivers deep into the desert for irrigation.

The Cholistan Desert, in the south of Pakistan’s Punjab province, is effectively the north-western continuation of the Thar. It is semi-nomadic herding country, dotted with forts such as Derawar that once guarded caravan routes. The border between the two countries runs through these deserts; the India vs Pakistan comparison sets out the wider differences between them.

Registan and the deserts of Afghanistan

The Registan, whose name simply means “land of sand”, occupies southern Afghanistan in the provinces of Kandahar and Helmand and runs south into Pakistan’s Balochistan. It is a sand desert of reddish dunes, lying south of the Helmand and Arghandab rivers. To its west lies the Dasht-e Margo, a stony desert whose name translates as “desert of death”.

The Karakum and the Kyzylkum

The two great sand deserts of Central Asia lie side by side between the Caspian Sea and the mountains. The Karakum (“black sand”) covers roughly seven-tenths of Turkmenistan; it is crossed by the Karakum Canal, which takes water from the Amu Darya to irrigate cotton and supply Ashgabat, and it contains the Darvaza gas crater, which has burned for decades. The Kyzylkum (“red sand”) lies between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, mostly in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

Both are continental deserts with hot summers and cold winters. Their rivers’ water was diverted on a vast scale in the Soviet era, which contributed to the shrinking of the Aral Sea; the exposed seabed has since become a new desert of salt and sand, often called the Aralkum. For more on these rivers, see Rivers of Asia.

The Taklamakan

The Taklamakan fills the Tarim Basin in China’s Xinjiang region, hemmed in by the Tian Shan to the north, the Kunlun to the south and the Pamir to the west. It is one of the largest shifting-sand deserts in the world and, because it is surrounded by high mountains and lies so far from the sea, one of the driest. Rivers fed by mountain snowmelt run into it and disappear. The two branches of the Silk Road skirted its northern and southern edges, linking oasis towns such as Kashgar, Kucha and Hotan rather than crossing the sands themselves.

The Gobi

The Gobi stretches across southern Mongolia and northern China. Its name is a Mongolian word for a type of dry, gravelly plain, and most of the Gobi is exactly that: bare stony ground, sparse grass and scrub, with relatively little sand. It is a cold desert, largely in the rain shadow of the Tibetan Plateau, where winter temperatures can drop below −30°C and summer days can be very hot. The Gobi is famous for its dinosaur fossils, including nests of dinosaur eggs found at the Flaming Cliffs in the 1920s, among the first to be recognised by science, and Mongolia’s two-humped Bactrian camels are native to its margins.

Badain Jaran and the Kubuqi

Within the wider Gobi region of Inner Mongolia, two smaller deserts stand out. The Badain Jaran has some of the tallest stationary dunes on Earth, with the highest rising several hundred metres above their bases, and is known for the more than a hundred small lakes scattered between them, fed by groundwater.

The Kubuqi lies on the Ordos Plateau inside the great northern loop of the Yellow River. It was long a source of the dust storms that affect northern China, including Beijing, which made it a focus of large-scale tree-planting and sand-fixing programmes. It is often cited as an example of desert reclamation, although how far such projects can be sustained in a dry climate is debated.

Frequently asked questions

What is the largest desert in Asia?

The Arabian Desert, at roughly 2.3 million km², is the largest desert in Asia. The Gobi, at around 1.3 million km², is the largest in East Asia and the second largest on the continent.

Is the Gobi a hot or a cold desert?

The Gobi is a cold desert. Summers can be hot, but winters are long and severe, with temperatures well below freezing, and occasional snow.

Why is the Taklamakan so dry?

The Taklamakan lies in the Tarim Basin, surrounded by the Tian Shan, Kunlun and Pamir mountains and very far from any ocean. The mountains block moist air, and the Tibetan Plateau keeps the monsoon out.

Where is the hottest place in Asia?

The Dasht-e Lut in Iran has recorded some of the highest land surface temperatures ever measured by satellite, above 70°C. These are ground temperatures; air temperatures there are lower.

What is the Empty Quarter?

The Empty Quarter, or Rub’ al Khali, is the southern part of the Arabian Desert, shared by Saudi Arabia, Oman, the UAE and Yemen. It is generally described as the largest continuous sand desert in the world.

Which Asian countries are mostly desert?

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Oman and Turkmenistan are largely desert, and deserts also cover large parts of Yemen, Mongolia, Iran, Jordan, Iraq and Syria.

To place these deserts on the map, browse by region: West Asia, Central Asia, South Asia and East Asia. For the mountains that create many of Asia’s rain shadows, see Mountain ranges of Asia; for other overviews, see Flags of Asia, Time zones in Asia and Asian capitals.