![]() The eastern part of Dasht-e Lut is a low plateau covered with salt flats with lowest elevations around 110 m above sea level (30.398609 N, 58.493041 E). During the spring wet season, water briefly flows down from the Kerman mountains, but it soon dries up, leaving behind only rocks, sand, and salt. The area of the desert is about 51,800 square kilometres (20,000 sq mi), the largest in Iran after Dasht-e Kavir. Dasht-e Lut is one of the largest of these desert basins, 480 kilometers (300 mi) long and 320 kilometers (200 mi) wide, and is considered to be one of the driest places on Earth. Iran's geography consists of a plateau surrounded by mountains and divided into drainage basins. The patchy, elongated, light-colored feature in the foreground (parallel to the mountain range) is the northernmost of the Dasht dry lakes that stretch southward 300 kilometers (190 mi). Iran is climatically part of the Afro-Asian belt of deserts, which stretches from Mauritania all the way to Mongolia. Description Yardangs in Lut Desert, Kerman Province, Iran The surface of its sand has been measured at temperatures as high as 70.7 ☌ (159.3 ☏), making it one of the world's driest and hottest places. The name is derived from 'Lut' which means bare and empty in Persian and 'dasht' which means plain in Persian. It is the world's 33rd-largest desert, and was included on UNESCO's World Heritage List on July 17, 2016. The Lut Desert, widely referred to as Dasht-e Lut ( Persian: دشت لوت, "Emptiness Plain"), is a large salt desert located in the provinces of Kerman and Sistan and Baluchestan, Iran. Where a few plants live in the slightly moisture edges of the dune field, the sand piles into nebkhas, which are basically hummock-like dunes that form around vegetation.ġkm (38.4 KB), 500m (130.5 KB), 250m (374.Problems playing this file? See media help. Not only are these among the largest dunes in the world, but they also take a variety of forms: linear, compound crescentic, star, and funnel shaped. This is a huge sand sea (erg) where actively moving dunes can reach heights of 475 meters (1,558 feet). In contrast, the dark tan area in the eastern basin is filled with long rippling lines. In the image, yardangs and kaluts can be seen in western section of the Lut Desert basin where they appear as a large area of roughly parallel ridges. In the Lut Desert some are up to 155 m high and their ridges can be followed for more than 40 km.” Yardangs appear as massive and dramatic corrugations across the landscape with ridges and corridors oriented parallel to the dominant prevailing wind. According to UNESCO, “Yardangs are bedrock features carved and streamlined by sandblasting, although they are also eroded by gullying from rainfall runoff and by mass movement. This creates a “sand blasting” effect (aeolian erosion) that has created stunning landforms, such as stony deserts, vast tall-dune fields, and yardangs. Between June and October each year, strong winds whip across the desert, carrying 1 mm quartz sand grains at high velocity. According to their description, in the Persian language “Lut” refers to bare land without water and devoid of vegetation. The region is so unique that it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016. A temperature of 70.7˚C (159.26˚F) has been recorded on the property. The Lut Desert is a land of dramatic and extreme environmental conditions-very low precipitation, long periods of high wind, unique land formations, and some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded on Earth. Because the basin is surrounded by mountains, it is in a rain shadow which creates a hyper-arid climate. ![]() The desert sits in a low-lying interior basin that reaches 185 meters (607 feet) below sea level. On January 18, 2021, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired a stunning true-color image of south-eastern Iran’s Lut Desert.Īlso known as Dasht-e-lut, the 2,278,015-hectare arid region straddles the provinces of Kermān, Sistāno Balūchestān and Khorāsān-e Jonūbi. ![]()
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