Abstract
(1) HERE is a model guide-book, for its presentation is artistic, its facts correct and well chosen and the deductions therefrom modern. A desert is a place of high summer temperatures with steady, drying winds and a rainfall not exceeding five inches; these are usually accompanied by a high, diurnal temperature range, here about 40° F. There are complications, for the rain-carrying winds rise in the Gulf of California, cross mountains and descend in occasional bursts on a dissected, mountainous land, extending from the Colorado River for two hundred miles along the inland half of California. The possible evaporation appears to be 80–100 inches, so that the intensity of the aridity is considerable. These conditions have only been reached since the end of the Pleistocene, and there would appear to have been several periods of wetness. To the south the fertile belt of the Colorado separates the similar desert of Arizona and Sonora (Mexico), and there have always been in both deserts lake and other areas of permanent water such as the famous ‘Death's Head Valley’ and the ‘Salton Sea’ in California.
(1) The Californian Deserts: a Visitor's Handbook.
By Edmund C. Jaeger; with Chapters by S. Stillman Berry and Malcolm J. Rogers. Revised edition. Pp. x + 209. (Stanford University, Calif.: Stanford University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1938.) 9s. net.
(2) Deserts
By Dr. Gayle Pickwell. (Whittlesey House Publication.) Pp. xiv + 174 (64 plates). (New-York and London: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1939.) 15s.
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GARDINER, J. (1) The Californian Deserts: a Visitor's Handbook (2) Deserts. Nature 144, 460 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144460a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144460a0