Deserts of Australia
The Australian deserts cover 18 percent of the Australian continent. They are after the Sahara, Antarctica and Greenland with a size of 1.371 million km ² desert region in the world 's fourth largest. The Great Sandy Desert has about Germany's surface.
The Australian deserts are largely uninhabited. In these deserts are not only classical landscapes with sand, but also an environment that is dominated by mountains and grasslands, forests, bushes, rivers and salt lakes.
You are deserts as hot ( German: hot deserts ), since they are characterized by low precipitation and extremely high temperatures and drought. The temperature reach 50 ° C and the precipitation is less than 250 millimeters per year. The average humidity is between 10 and 20 percent.
Only about 15 percent of the deserts in the world are made of sand dune fields. Some of the longest dunes in the world, sometimes hundreds of kilometers long, located in the Simpson Desert. Sandy deserts are the Great Victoria Desert and Sand Great Sandy Desert; Stone deserts the Gibson and Sturt Stony Desert.
Waste
The following table gives an overview of the Australian deserts:
A large contiguous wilderness area form the Tanami, Great Sandy, Little Sandy, Gibson and Great Victoria desert sand in Western Australia and a smaller Simpson, Sturt, Strzelecki and Tirariwüste in the east. Spatially isolated between Great Victoria sand and Simpson is the small Pedirka Desert.
The Western Desert, which describes a cultural region of the indigenous people of Australia, comprising the Gibson, Great Victoria, Great Sand and Little Sandy Desert in the states of Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia.
European discovery history
The Strzeleckiwüste was named in 1845 by the explorer Charles Sturt after the Polish explorer Paul Edmund Strzelecki.
The first European who crossed the Great Sandy Desert, Peter Egerton Warburton was. He was ravaged by exhaustion and blinded in one eye in on the coast of Western Australia. He owed his survival Charley, an Aboriginal tracker.
The Little Sandy Desert adjoins the Great Sandy Desert and ye are like in terms of their landscape and vegetation.
The name " Great Victoria Desert " forgave the British explorer Ernest Giles, who had crossed the desert in 1875. It is dedicated to Queen Victoria.
The Sturt Stony desert got its name from the British explorer John McDouall Stuart, who crossed for the first time in 1861. He named the desert after the British explorer Charles Sturt, on whose expeditions he had taken earlier.
1866 reached the expedition of Peter Egerton Warburton the Tirariwüste coming from the west.
The British explorer Ernest Giles was the Gibson Desert in memory of Alfred Gibson its name remained missing during an expedition from 1873 to 1874.
The Tanamiwüste named the explorer and prospector Allan Davidson. He forgave the name only on his second expedition to this desert area, which ended in 1900. " Tanami " was the original name of the Aborigines for two caves with clear drinking water.
The Pedirkawüste spreads over the geological Pedirka sedimentary basins.
The name of the Simpson desert goes back to Allen Simpson, a geographer who pushed forward into this wilderness in 1845. The name suggested the explorer and geologist Cecil Madigan. Only in 1936 it managed Edmund Colson first white man to cross the entire Simpson Desert. Previously, the great Australian explorer Charles Sturt and David Lindsay had failed.
Aboriginal
The tribes and clans of the Aborigines live for thousands of years nomadic in the desert areas. They lived on the local flora and fauna, from what is now called Bush food, and made sure that their drinking water sources remained intact. The nomads moved in clearly demarcated tribal areas. Major tribes who live in the desert areas, for example, the Arrernte, Pitjantjatjara and Luritja. The area of influence of the latter strain ranged from Uluru to the Nullarbor Plain. The root of the Dieri lives in a big area of Simpson, Strzelecki and Tirariwüste and owns land rights over 87 733 square kilometers. Today, many Aboriginal people live in settlements in the deserts.
The secluded desert areas long remained undeveloped. So the root of the Spinifex People had for the first time in the 1950s, contact with whites, when they were expelled by the British and Australian government from their tribal area because of nuclear testing ( 1950 to 1963 ). The Pintupi Nine, a group of nine Aborigines from the tribe of Pintupi, lived up to the stone age in October 1984 in the territory of the Gibson Desert, before they first met white people as they left the desert. Both discoveries were at the time sensations.
Large parts of the Australian desert areas are an integral part of the cultural complex Desert. For the Aborigines, the in- desert area Uluru Kata Tjuta and the great with their dreamtime stories cultural significance. The Aborigines of the desert brought forth many important artists, one of the first and most famous was Albert Namatjira, who was born in Hermannsburg in the Great Sandy Desert.
Vegetation
In the Australian deserts are two types of grasslands occur. Tussock or Mitchell Prairie is located in the desert regions in the Northern Territory, South Australia and western Queensland. The annual precipitation falling on these lush grasses of the genus of Astrebla marl and alluvial soils, from 150 to 500 mm. On the heavy clay soils no trees take root and they are characterized by bushfires. On the spinifex or Hummock grasslands grow sting head grasses ( Spinifex ) in Horsten, in addition to free space as green Triodia pungens and blue-gray Triodia goitre. On the sand dunes of the Simpson, Strzelecki and the Tirariwüste dominated Zygochloa. In many desert areas prevails grassland with mulga bushes (Acacia aneura ).
Savannah with Acacia species niederwüchsigen cover large areas in the south of the arid zone in which fall from 200 to 500 mm rainfall in winter and summer. The Acacia species, called Mulga, grow on the plains, mountain slopes and hills of the deserts. In connection with the bush fires that ignite mainly through the spinifex grasses that burn not resistenen Mula - bushes, which then no longer grow back. There is evidence that the Aborigines inflamed no bush fire in mulga landscapes. The vegetated desert areas of Mulga are further from land clearing, extensive livestock farming and firewood threatened. At the eastern end of the arid zone is the so-called Witchetty Bush. In this area is rooted endemic species of acacia Acacia kempeana from which nourishes up to seven inches large wood drill larva that Witchetty Made. She is very proteinaceous and was an important part of the diet of the Aborigines.
Eucalyptus Woodland thrives along the dried-up riverbeds. On the floor under the eucalypts grow grasses.
Chenopodiaceae - bushes, which is usually not more than 1.5 meters high, is located in the southern desert areas. It is salt plants that grow both on dry and on saline soils.
In the deserts there are permanent or seepage of fresh water bodies that formed in rock areas or in sandstone canyons.
Numerous salt lakes occur after heavy rainfall and fill temporarily the underlying salt flats. The salt lakes cover a relatively small amount of land in the desert areas. A significant example is the salt lake of Lake Eyre, which extends over areas of Gibson and Tirariwüste and fills about once in 25 years to fully dry and then falls.
17 source areas have emerged in the deserts as a result of subsurface Great Artesian Basin, one of the largest fresh water basin in the world. The light emerging from the source water is highly mineralized. The sources partially form the habitat of endemic fish and the source area is covered with rare plants. Numerous sources have dried up by extensive agricultural use in the last 100 years.
Spinifex or hummock grasslands with Triodia pungens green and blue-gray Triodia goitre
Mulga scrub
Maireana sedifolia is the most widely used Chenopodien - shrub
Growth in the Tanamiwüste along the Tanami Track
Fauna
In the Australian desert animals live considerably less than in the Australian coastal regions. The most common creatures in the arid Australian areas are insects, such as termites and ants, which are of great importance for the ecology.
About 95 species of mammals living there at the time of European colonization, of which 17 are extinct, such as the Desert Long bandicoot ( Perameles eremiana ), the ants Beutler ( Myrmecobius fasciatus ) and the long-tailed Hüpfmaus ( Notomys longicaudatus ). Survived have mainly small rodents, insectivorous bats, marsupials, kangaroos and wallabies. A major threat to the vegetation, the free-running camels in the desert.
Over 200 bird species live in the desert areas, including the ratites the emus, parrots, cockatoos, owls and birds of prey.
Reptiles live in numerous deserts, such as the Thorny Devil, monitor lizards, iguanas, geckos and Agamas. The most numerous species of lizards in the world are found in the Australian desert, of them there are about 40 species.
In the few permanent fresh water - holes live alongside fish and shellfish, crustaceans and insects. 34 species of fish in the Lake Eyre and further to the artesian springs, for example, of Dalhousie Springs in South Australia. About 40 species of frogs were observed after heavy rains.
Thorny Devil
The Gould's goanna is a large lizard, which is found in the Australian desert
The Night parrot, which is probably extinct
The Galah lives in wooded savannas and open grasslands
Australian Wüstengrundel
Other desert areas
There are in Australia more than wilderness designated areas that are not available in compounds with the above Australian deserts. On Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia is an area of two square kilometers, which is called the Little Sahara, a formation of several sand dunes on the south coast. In Victoria, about 375 kilometers west of Melbourne, there is the Little Desert. The Painted Desert is located 121 km north west of Coober Pedy in South Australia.
The existing limestone nearly treeless Nullarbor Plain in South Australia is also called the Nullabor Desert.