Gobi Desert

The Gobi is a cold desert, spread over an estimated 1.3 million square kilometres of southern Mongolia and northern China. It sits on a high plateau, much of it between about 900 and 1,500 metres, cut off from moist air by the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau far to the south. The result is a rain shadow: Dalanzadgad, the South Gobi's capital, averages only about 134 millimetres of precipitation a year, most of it in brief summer showers.

Sand is the exception rather than the rule. Most of the Mongolian Gobi is gravel plain, rocky steppe and low mountain, and the word gobi itself describes this stony, thinly grassed ground. Dune fields such as Khongoryn Els are dramatic but cover a small share of the whole. The climate swings hard: Dalanzadgad has recorded 39.9°C in July and minus 36.1°C in December, and a hot afternoon can give way to a cold night. Spring brings strong winds and dust storms, while autumn tends to be calm and clear.

Scientific work in the Gobi took off with the American Museum of Natural History's Central Asiatic Expeditions, led by Roy Chapman Andrews from 1922. On 13 July 1923, at the red sandstone cliffs of Bayanzag, which Andrews called the Flaming Cliffs, expedition member George Olsen found fossil eggs, the first that scientists recognised as dinosaur eggs. They were credited to Protoceratops until museum teams in the 1990s found an identical egg holding the embryo of an oviraptorid, a bird-like relative of Oviraptor.

Other finds followed. In 1971 a Polish-Mongolian team at Tugrugiin Shiree uncovered the Fighting Dinosaurs, a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops preserved locked together, now regarded as a national treasure. The Nemegt Basin to the west has yielded Tarbosaurus, an Asian cousin of Tyrannosaurus. Such riches draw smugglers: in 2012 a Tarbosaurus skeleton sold at a New York auction for over a million dollars before US authorities seized it, and it went home to Mongolia in 2013. Mongolian law bars the export of fossils, so look, photograph and leave everything where it lies.

Ömnögovi is Mongolia's camel country. The National Statistics Office counted about 501,300 camels nationwide at the end of 2025, and the province keeps the largest herd of any. Herding families move between seasonal pastures with goats, sheep and camels, and live exposed to the weather: the 2023 to 2024 dzud, a winter disaster in which animals could not reach grazing, helped cut the national herd to 57.6 million by the end of 2024. The Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold mine and the Tavan Tolgoi coalfield have brought jobs and roads, but also dust, traffic and competition for water.

Wildlife survives in the spaces between. The mountains hold Siberian ibex, argali and lammergeier, and in the Tost Mountains west of the park a long-term study run by the Snow Leopard Conservation Foundation and the Snow Leopard Trust since 2008 recorded 20 resident snow leopards in 2022. On the plains, a 2013 survey estimated nearly 36,000 khulan, the Asiatic wild ass, across the South Gobi. Farther west, Great Gobi A Strictly Protected Area shelters the critically endangered wild Bactrian camel and the Gobi bear, of which perhaps 30 to 50 survive.