In my last post, I talked about how I live in “the” desert and it is hot here.  Those things are both true, this time of year.  But six months from now, it will be lovely during the day and so cold at night you wouldn’t want to be caught out without a jacket for fear of freezing your pudenda off.  And I won’t have moved.  So what gives?  How can the desert be both a place of extreme heat and bitter cold?

The word desert conjures images of sand dunes and camels.  And some deserts consist of just that.  Some add cacti.  Some add hot temperatures.  I call this the “Lawrence of Arabia” kind of desert, after the 1962 Hollywood film starring Peter O’Toole that won best picture that year as well as a host of other awards.  Because Hollywood exerts an oversized influence on society and our individual psyches, this, the Lawrence of Arabia kind of desert, is what most people think of when they hear the term ‘desert.’

But what if I told you the largest desert in the world is in Antarctica?  With its vast ice sheet, covering approximately 5.5 million square miles, you won’t find any sand dunes here.  And camels are replaced by penguins.  You won’t spot a cactus here, and I’ve never been but I’ve heard it’s quite cold.

Obviously, there are different kinds of desert, but their primary characteristic is that they are areas that receive very little rainfall.  Beyond that, the most significant difference between the four main types of desert is their temperature and where they are located on the planet (mountains, plains, coasts, etc.).  The four main types are:

• Hot and dry deserts – as the name suggests, hot/dry temperatures year-round.  These are your Lawrence of Arabia deserts.  Think the Sahara in northern Africa.
• Semi-arid deserts – long, dry summers with some rain in the winter; cooler than Hot and dry deserts, even in the summertime.  Palm Springs, where I live, is in a Semi-arid desert known as the Colorado Desert, part of the larger Sonora Desert located in the southwestern United States, and northern Mexico.
• Coastal deserts – these have the most humidity of all four types, but rainfall is still rare.  A good example would be the Atacama Desert in Chile, known for being one of the driest places on Earth; cold ocean currents along the coast cause air to cool, preventing moisture from reaching the land.
• Cold deserts – dry and extremely cold, though heavy snow throughout the winter is common.  The Antarctic Polar Desert is, of course, a Cold desert, but so is the Gobi Desert between the peaks of the Himalayas and Siberia.

Someone noted in an email to me yesterday that I uncharitably chide people who complain about the heat in Palm Springs by hitting them with a “it’s a desert, what do you expect?” condescension, and felt the need to point out that the largest “desert” in the world is in fact a place where the average temperature hovers around 0 degrees Fahrenheit, can get as low as minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit, and once recorded a temperature (in July 1983) of an astounding minus 128.6 degrees Fahrenheit.  He is correct, but as I pointed out to him, making my snide remark geologically and meteorologically accurate would rob it of its terse bitchiness, which is what I was going for.  Still, I always enjoy hearing from readers from whom I often learn a great deal, if not from them personally then from researching the veracity of their claims.  So in that vein, I’m trying out a new comeback:

As comebacks go, I think I’ll stick with my original.  Cattiness over accuracy!