Internationally renowned photographer Michael Martin has travelled through every desert on earth, crossing Asia, Australia, the Americas, and Africa, seeking out the most spectacular landscapes, from the Rub al-Khali to the Great Sandy Desert, the Great Basin, and the Kalahari. Many of these "wastelands" consist of more than just desert sand. Afghanistan's Bamian region is notable for its deep blue-green lakes set in a rocky landscape. The Danakil's unnamed volcanoes glow in the Ethiopian night, while Chile's Atacama region harbours geysers that can erupt at any moment. This book is a journey of some 60,000 miles and the first single-volume documentation of earth's breathtaking desert landscapes.

Ethiopia: The Omo Valley

Born in Munich in 1963, photographer Michael Martin must surely have been a nomad in another life, as he's become the world's photographer of the African deserts. Over the years, he's published 15 books and taken at least 80 journeys throughout the world's deserts, in often dangerous conditions. This book, five years in the making, is sort of a culmination of his work to date, and it's lovely. Thankfully, Martin's as interested in the inhabitants of these far-flung and strangely shifting lands as he is in the stark beauty of the environments themselves. None of the commentary is hackneyed or written with postcolonial prejudices; on the contrary, it's quite clear the long-haired and adventurous Martin wishes he could be living in the desert himself. If you think this is going to be all a bunch of pictures of sand in various formations, you are sorely mistaken. Here are breathtaking images of mineral-encrusted salt lakes, strange craggy rocks, beautiful cacti, and people with weather-beaten faces who live in trailer homes, tents and medieval towns.

Internationally renowned photographer Michael Martin has traveled through every desert on earth, crossing Asia, Australia, the Americas, and Africa, seeking out the most spectacular landscapes, from the Rub al-Khali to the Great Sandy Desert, the Great Basin, and the Kalahari. Many of these "wastelands" consist of more than just desert sand. Afghanistan's Bamian region is notable for its deep blue-green lakes set in a rocky landscape. The Danakil's unnamed volcanoes glow in the Ethiopian night, while Chile's Atacama region harbors geysers that can erupt at any moment. Martin was joined on his five-year motorcycle odyssey by camerawoman Elke Wallner, who has documented the major deserts of the world in a television series. Together they overcame numerous obstacles—political and physical—to accomplish a journey of some 60,000 miles and the first single-volume documentation of earth's breathtaking desert landscapes. 300 color photographs and 23 maps.

Countries visited include: Afghanistan, Algeria, Australia, Bolivia, Botswana, Chad, Chile, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Jordan, Mali, Mauritania, Mongolia, Namibia, Niger, Oman, Peru, Qatar, Tibet, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, United States, Uzbekistan, Yemen. A desert is a landscape or region that receives very little precipitation. Deserts can be defined as areas that receive an average annual precipitation of less than 250 mm (10 in), or as areas in which more water is lost than falls as precipitation. In the Köppen climate classification system, deserts are classed as BWh (hot desert) or BWk (temperate desert). In the Thornthwaite climate classification system, deserts would be classified as arid megathermal climates. Deserts are part of a wider classification of regions that, on an average annual basis, have a moisture deficit (i.e. they can potentially lose more than is received). Deserts are located where vegetation cover is sparse to almost nonexistent. Deserts take up about one third of the Earth's land surface.

Hot deserts usually have a large diurnal and seasonal temperature range, with high daytime temperatures, and low nighttime temperatures (due to extremely low humidity). In hot deserts the temperature in the daytime can reach 45 °C/113 °F or higher in the summer, and dip to 0 °C/32°F or lower in the winter. Water acts to trap infrared radiation from both the sun and the ground, and dry desert air is incapable of blocking sunlight during the day or trapping heat during the night. Thus, during daylight most of the sun's heat reaches the ground, and as soon as the sun sets the desert cools quickly by radiating its heat into space. Urban areas in deserts lack large (more than 14 °C/25 °F) daily temperature variations, partially due to the urban heat island effect. Many deserts are formed by rain shadows; mountains blocking the path of precipitation to the desert. Deserts are often composed of sand and rocky surfaces. Sand dunes called ergs and stony surfaces called hamada surfaces compose a minority of desert surfaces. Exposures of rocky terrain are typical, and reflect minimal soil development and sparseness of vegetation. Bottomlands may be salt-covered flats. Eolian processes are major factors in shaping desert landscapes. Cold deserts (also known as polar deserts) have similar features, except the main form of precipitation is snow rather than rain. Antarctica is the world's largest cold desert (composed of about 98 percent thick continental ice sheet and 2 percent barren rock). Some of the barren rock is to be found in the so-called Dry Valleys of Antarctica that almost never get snow, which can have ice-encrusted saline lakes that suggest evaporation far greater than the rare snowfall due to the strong katabatic winds that evaporate even ice. The largest hot desert is the Sahara. Deserts sometimes contain valuable mineral deposits that were formed in the arid environment or that were exposed by erosion. Due to extreme and consistent dryness, some deserts are ideal places for natural preservation of artifacts and fossils.

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