Gibson Desert
Template:Short description Template:Use Australian English Template:Use dmy dates
The Gibson Desert is a large desert in Western Australia, mainly in an almost pristine state. It is about Template:Convert in size, making it the fifth largest desert in Australia, after the Great Victoria, Great Sandy, Tanami and Simpson deserts. The Gibson Desert is both an interim Australian bioregion and desert ecoregion.
Location and description
The Gibson Desert is between the saline Kumpupintil Lake and Lake Macdonald along the Tropic of Capricorn, south of the Great Sandy Desert, east of the Little Sandy Desert, and north of the Great Victoria Desert. The altitude rises to just above Template:Convert in places. As noted by early Australian explorers such as Ernest Giles,<ref name="twice">Template:Cite book</ref> large portions of the desert are characterized by gravel-covered terrains covered in thin desert grasses, and it also contains extensive areas of undulating red sand plains and dunefields, low rocky/gravelly ridges and substantial upland portions with a high degree of laterite formation. The sandy soil of the lateritic buckshot plains is rich in iron. Several isolated saltwater lakes occur in the region's centre, and to the southwest, a system of small lakes follows paleo-drainage features.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Groundwater sources include portions of the Officer Basin and Canning Basin.
Climate
Rainfall in the Gibson Desert ranges from Template:Convert annually, while evaporation rates are in the range of Template:Convert per year. The climate is generally hot; summer maximum temperatures rise above Template:Convert whilst in winter the maximum may fall to Template:Convert and minimum winter temperatures dip to Template:Convert.<ref>Great Victoria and Gibson Deserts, Western Australia from Climate and Weather Atlas of Australia by Michael Thompson, verified 2006-01-23.</ref>
Name
Explorer Ernest Giles named the Gibson Desert after a member of his party, Alfred Gibson, who became lost and presumably died in this desert during an expedition in 1874.<ref name=twice/>
Indigenous habitation
In much of the region, especially the drier western portion, most of the people living in the area are Indigenous Australians. In 1984, due to a severe drought which had dried up all of the springs and depleted the bush foods, a group of the Pintupi people who were living a traditional semi-nomadic desert-dwelling life, walked out of a remote wilderness in the central-eastern portion of the Gibson Desert (northeast of Warburton) and made contact for the first time with mainstream Australian society. They are believed to have been perhaps the last uncontacted tribe in Australia.Template:Citation needed On the eastern margin of the region, population centres (which include people of European descent) include Warburton, Mantamaru and Warakurna. Young Indigenous adults from the Gibson Desert region work in the Wilurarra Creative programs to maintain and develop their culture.<ref name="Wilurarra Creative">Wilurarra Creative</ref>
See also
References
Further reading
- Thackway, R and I D Cresswell (1995) An interim biogeographic regionalisation for Australia : a framework for setting priorities in the National Reserves System Cooperative Program Version 4.0 Canberra : Australian Nature Conservation Agency, Reserve Systems Unit, 1995. Template:ISBN
External links
- Gibson Desert 1997 Template:Webarchive; a photo album of the Gibson Desert by Stuart Jackson, Verified 2006-01-23
- Across Australia Motorbike Tour
Template:Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia (IBRA) Template:Deserts Template:Authority control