Are cold deserts a thing?

I think he meant a desert of SAND thats not hot. stop memeing about antarctica.

I would like something like picture, where it is cold.

For post-apocalypse fantasy.

Pretty much any high mountain desert gets cold as fuck as soon as winter hits. Even disregarding stuff like antartica, you can totally have deserts that are just cold because the weather has decided that this next few months are smack dab between Windchill Junction and 40 Below.

>I think he meant a desert of SAND thats not hot. stop memeing about antarctica.

I can't believe anyone is this retarded.

Yes, in China and West Mongolia. I know because bacterian camels live in that sort of climate and were crossed in The Silk Road. Sandy deserts that also get snow, lots of dry and arid mountains.

Sandy deserts even get cold. Where did you go to middle/lower school?

Yes, every single night!

yes. Mongolia, Antarctica.

Basically the Ghobi desert isn't a sandy desert, it's a scrub desert (needs to git gud) but is mostly dirt not sand, small amounts of scrub keep the ground mostly in place and survive off the very small amounts of moisture that does fall or can be collected from morning dew.

Now if you go looking literally NEXT DOOR to the Ghobi, going into Turkmenistan where the Taklamakan waits to be fucking weird.

The Taklamakan you see has two modes: In winter it's a giant series of sand dunes with no water. In summer the meltwater from the mountains to the southwest of the desert flows through the desert in millions of tiny streams. But note how the desert is kinda rhombus shaped with four points, well the mountains aren't all quite on the same latitudes so when the snow on them melts, they do so at slight different times from mountain to mountain.

So what happens is pic related - a truly immense amount of water flows through this desert over a summer, but any specific area of the desert sees a relatively small amount of water flow through it for about a week so mostly what the water does is erode and create more sand for the dunes of the winter.

But remember that this is all water off mountains to the WARMER south, and bits of the desert's summer rivers can ice up during the night and produce icy quicksand in the morning when it melts and begins flowing again. And during the winter the sand is so dry it is easily picked up by the wind and has been known to sandblast off the frostbitten noses of travellers who've tried to travel over it by night.

>Taklamakan
It's just like my favorite doujins!
perveden.com/en/en-manga/taklamakan-zoo/1/5/

NOW /thread

Fun fact! Back in the old days "desert" basically meant any place where no one lived. So you'll see that come up in books from like the early 19th century and earlier.

For instance, the novel Edgar Huntly, written in 1826, keeps talking about the desert of Pennsylvania, even though Pennsylvania is obviously all forest (hence the -sylvania part of the name). Also, it wasn't exactly a desert in that sense either, since it was full of Native Americans. Well, I guess an American writer in the 1820s wasn't really thinking of the Indians as people.

That's pretty informative. Extreme weathers sounded weird.

Can't remebernif it is the Gobi or just near it. But theres a high alitutude desert in that part the world that sees regular snowfall, but is still extremely dry because the snow sublimates instead of melting during the day due to the lower air pressure. The camels there eat snow as their main water source.