Where do you think the world’s largest desert is located? Northern Africa? The Sahara is but the biggest hot desert. It’s, however, not the largest overall. That distinction is reserved for an unlikely place: Antarctica.
Google users were taken by surprise after learning this piece of trivia. The question was part of its Googlies campaign, which gamifies web search for such intriguing queries.
Put simply, a Googly is a question that, on the surface, seems to have an obvious answer. When it comes up, people think they ought to have knowledge from their general observation of the world.
In Cricket, a googly is a type of spin-bowling delivery that’s often used as a variation to “bamboozle” the batter, and these daily questions posed by Google have the same effect. In fact, the name is a clever play on the site’s name itself.
So, if you’re still with us and wondering how Antarctica could possibly qualify as a desert in the first place, much less be the largest biome of its kind, let us put your mind at ease.
“A desert is a land area that receives very little rainfall, typically less than 10 inches a year, making it an arid ecosystem with sparse vegetation due to the extreme dryness,” a Google overview states.
Antarctica classifies as a polar desert, where instead of sand dunes, there are icebergs. The continent is one of the driest places on Earth.
“Antarctica receives an average of 6.5 inches precipitation per year, mostly as snow. The interior is drier, receiving less than 2 inches per year, while the coastal regions receive more than 8 inches,” the search engine adds.
This makes Antarctica drier than the Sahara Desert, with its McMurdo Dry Valleys being some of the driest, coldest and windiest ecosystems on the planet.
Covering around 9.4% of Earth’s total land area, it’s nearly twice the size of Australia. The Sahara, by comparison, accounts for about 8% of the terrestrial surface.