Kumtag Desert than across it, and can be handled with certain precautions. Kumtag Desert The Kumtag Desert (, "kum-tag" meaning "sand-mountain" in a number of Turkic languages), is an arid landform in northwestern China, which was proclaimed as a national park in the year 2002. The oval Tarim Basin with its central Taklamakan Desert is bounded on the north, west and south by mountains. On the east side the Kumtag is an unbroken plain about 100 miles from north to south that runs from the Taklamakan to Gansu and Mongolia. Many modern maps do not show a Kumtag in this sense which
Taklamakan Desert rain shadow of the Himalayas, Taklamakan is a paradigmatic cold desert climate. Given its relative proximity with the cold to frigid air masses in Siberia, extreme temperatures are recorded in wintertime, sometimes well below , while in summer they can rise up to . During the 2008 Chinese winter storms episode, the Taklamakan was reported to be covered, for the first time in its history, entirely with a thin layer of snow reaching , with a temperature of in some observatories. Its extreme inland position, virtually in the very heartland of Asia and thousands of kilometres from any open body