Train Passing By In The Desert

The sandy, silent landscape is kicked into high gear as roaring rail cars, a hundred in length, come careening through the golden desert, sending every little critter crawling under a rock or flying high into the sky. The steel and smoke seem to penetrate even the most calm and clean of places, practically turning this stately natural place into an industrial dumping ground. A desert is a landscape or region that receives an extremely low amount of precipitation, less than enough to support growth of most plants. Most deserts have an average annual precipitation of less than 400 millimetres (16 in). Deserts can also be described as areas where more water is lost by evapotranspiration than falls as precipitation. Deserts are sometimes classified as "hot" and "cold" deserts. Cold deserts can be covered in snow or ice; frozen water unavailable to plant life. These are more commonly referred to as tundra if a short season of above-freezing temperatures is experienced, or as an ice cap if the temperature remains below freezing year-round, rendering the land almost completely lifeless. In some parts of the world, deserts are created by a rain shadow effect in which air masses lose much of their moisture as they move over a mountain range; other areas are arid by virtue of being very far from the nearest available sources of moisture.