Non-story of the Week

By Hayley Birch

However you dress them up, there are some scientific studies that are just never going to grab the headlines.

Take, for instance, yesterday’s “revelation” that the world’s second largest desert is older than previously thought. Now there are a number of reasons why this fails so spectacularly to impress. First of all, it’s the world’s second largest desert; not the largest, no, the second largest. Who even knows what the world’s first largest desert is? Okay, so geography’s never been my strong point, but…

"... if sand dunes and sand cats don’t make the Arabian desert a sandy desert, then what the hell does?"

Anyway, second of all, who knew how old the “Taklimakan” desert was before it got older? And in any case, what’s the difference between 3.5 and 5.3 million years old? It’s just swapping numbers around as far as I’m concerned.

But it’s when you start to scrutinise the facts that this whole thing becomes really absurd. You’d think, given such a simple premise for a news report, there wouldn’t be much that could go wrong. You’d think the Chinese scientists who came up with this non-story would have at least checked their facts; made sure at least that the details were correct before they were universally swept under the carpet.

Well, you’d be wrong.

As far as I’m aware, the definition of a desert is “a landscape or region that receives very little precipitation”. Which makes both the polar regions quite legitimate candidates for deserts. At around 5.5 million square miles each, positions one and two in the world’s largest deserts stakes are, I think you’ll find, already accounted for.

Furthermore - not that I enjoy picking holes in reputable scientists’ research or anything - even if you take polar regions out of the equation, the Taklimakan (which, incidentally, means “desert of death” or “if you go in you will never come out”) comes in, not second, third or even fourth largest, but sixteenth. Sixteenth! (see the table)

Now one possibility for this grand aberration is that the scientists, or - let’s blame it on the media instead - their press people, meant the Taklimakan Desert is actually the second largest sandy desert.

Still in disbelief that anyone could have made up such lies and distributed them to the world’s press, I set about trying to prove, for my own sanity, that this is in fact what they had done. But looking down the list of the fifteen bigger deserts, we find one called the “Great Sandy Desert”.

My creeping suspicion turned out to be correct. Alright, so if you’re going to be precise about these things, then maybe not every square inch of each of these fifteen deserts is covered in sand. But if sand dunes and sand cats don’t make the Arabian desert a sandy desert, then what the hell does?

So if we’re going to be precise, what seemed at first glance to be a – for want of a better word – rubbish headline: Age of Second Largest Desert Disputed, turns out to read something along the lines of:

Age of Eighteenth Largest Desert (or Second Largest if You’re Only Counting Those Where Every Last Millimetre is Covered in Sand) is a Little Bit Older than People-Who-Actually-Care-About-How-Old-Deserts-Are First Thought.

And if that had been the title of their story I might well have read and enjoyed it. So there.

Hayley's page.

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Image: Asif Akbar

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