desert

A region receiving less than 10 inches of precipitation per year — defined by absence of water, not by presence of sand. Only about 20 percent of the world's desert is sand (erg); the rest is rock (hamada), gravel (reg), salt flat (sabkha), or bare earth. Deserts cover roughly a third of the earth's land surface. The word names a landscape often misread as empty, but a desert is full — of adapted life, of geological process, of light and heat and silence that are their own forms of abundance.