What percentage of the Earth is covered by deserts?
828711
The better question is what percentage of land is desert, in which case it's something on the order of 4-9%.  Roughly.
646483
Earth - 100%\nMoon - 16.6%\nMercury - 37.8% \nVenus - 90.7%\nMars - 37.7%\nJupiter - 236.4%\nSaturn - 106.4%\nUranus - 88.9%\nNeptune - 112.5%\nPluto - 6.7%
80739
The Sahara is the world's largest hot desert, over 9,000,000 km² (3,500,000 mi²).  \n\nThe volume of a grain of quartz sand with a diameter of 0.060 mm (a lower bound) is 1.13 x 10^-13 m^3 with a mass of 3.00 x 10-13 g. As an upper bound, the volume and mass of a grain of sand with a diameter of 2.10 mm are 4.85 x 10-9 m3 and 1.28 x 10-8 g.[1].\n\nThe deposits of the modern-day Sahara are generally less than 100 meters thick, though there are some sandy landforms that can reach 450 meters high. (3)\n\nArea of the Sahara: 9 000 000 (km^2) = 9.0 × 10^12 m^2.\nDepth of the sand in the Sahara: approx 100m\nVolume of sand in the sahara: (9.0*10^12)*(100m) = 9.0*10^14 m^3.\nVolume of a grain of sand: 1.13 x 10^-13 m^3\n\nTherefore the # of grains of sand in the Sahara is: (9.0*10^14 m^3)/(1.13 x 10^-13 m^3) = approx 8.0x10^27 grains of sand or 8000000000000000000000000000 grains of sand or 8 octillion grains of sand.
448545
Sahara, in North Africa, is the largest non-polar desert covers 3.5 million sq. mi.\n\nThe polar deserts are larger.\nAntarctic - 5.5 million Sq. mi.\nArctic - 5.4 million sq. mi.
213982
The Sahara is the world's largest non-polar desert, over 9,000,000 km² (3,500,000 mi²), about the same size as the United States. \n\nThe United States's total area is 3,718,711 square miles (9,631,418 km²), of which land makes up 3,537,438 square miles (9,161,923 km²) and water makes up 181,273 square miles (469,495 km²).\n\nSo, in this comparison, the United States is larger.
518898
There live about 6 billion people on the Earth, so it's about 1/6 of the worlds population. Don't know how much % that is... sorry...
252615
Depends on which desert.  I live in Albuquerque NM, which is in a desert.  We have a vast (but shrinking) reserve of water under the ground.\n\nAlso, the largest body of fresh water in the world, Lake Vostok in Antartica is burried under miles of ice in a desert area.
329853
The earth is on an axis so the sun doesnt cover the northern and southern regions as well ........i meant the polar regions in this statement
645256
Most sand is composed of silicon dioxide (quartz) which is very resistant to acids and abrasion, and that is also the reason beaches have sand. Whether the erosional force is air or water, most other materials are more easily removed, leaving behind the sand. Often this process took place in the ocean, then plate tectonics (the same force that built the mountains you mentioned) or sea level fluctuations leave the sea bed exposed to become a desert. So yes, many deserts were once part of a seabed, and often marine fossils can be found in outcrops of desert bedrock.
98195
Total surface area of earth= 196,935,000 sq miles\n30% of that is 59,080,500 sq miles
1075596
8.7 percent of the Earth's total surface area, or \n29.8 percent of its land area, and it contains more than \n60 percent of the world's human population.
495041
The lest populated parts of earth include Antarctica,very large portion of Canada,Greenland,Russia and Australia are almost uninhabited.Also the Saharan countries like Algeria,Libya,Mali,Niger,etc have scarce population.Arabian countries in west Asia are also scarcely populated.
77133
The Desert Ecosystem\n\nDeserts are very hot and dry places. Deserts get very little rain each year. So how do plants and animals live here? This section on the desert ecosystem will explain how! \n\nBut first, do you know what a desert looks like? It is made of sand and rocks. Sometimes the sand is red! There aren't a lot of clouds over deserts, so it gets really hot during the day and cold at night.
923291
That depends on what you mean by the "entire world".  Planet earth is pretty much 100% material.  Any planet, or collection of planets, is also 100% material.\n\nBut the sun is plasma, and composes most of the mass in the solar system.  So the solar system is closer to 99% plasma, 1% material.\n\nBut those pesky astronomers were having trouble with some equations - seems like there was lots more stuff out there than plasma and material, but they couldn't find it.  Until recently.  They discovered load of new stuff, call "dark energy" and "dark matter" (since you can't see it from here, it must be 'dark', right?)\n\nTurns out most of the mass of the universe is dark energy and dark matter (about 95%), with the remaining little bit of plasma and regular matter.
819075
97% of the worlds water is salt water, 2% would be fresh water locking in glaciers and ice caps, and the remaining 1% would be stored in aquifiers, groundwater, lakes, rivers, ponds, streams. so to answer the question, ponds represent<1% of the worlds water supply
15340
Earth has a surface area of 196,940,400 square miles, slightly less than a perfect ball with a diameter of 7913.5 miles The surface area of the seven continents and all the islands of the world is about 57 million miles, while the total area of the six habitable continents (Antarctica excluded) is around 52 million square miles. \n\nThe human population on earth has crossed six billion. If we distribute all the exposed land evenly among all mankind, 133 people would have to share one square mile. What that means is that every single person on Earth, man woman and child would have close to five acres of land for his or her use. More precisely, each person would get 209,000 square feet of land, or a square plot of land 457 feet on each side. \n\nNot all this land can be used beneficially however. A significant portion of the Earth's exposed land is unhabitable or cannot be used for any agricultural purpose. Large portions lie in the far north. Large portions are extremely arid. Large portions are very mountainous. In sum, only about one fourth of all the land on earth, or somewhat more than 12 million square miles, is arable. \n\nToday, over half of the arable land in the world is in fact not under cultivation. Bringing the unused land into service in many cases would require huge investments of money and effort, and would do considerable damage to the environment. For example, only about 28% of the arable land on the African continent is used for growing crops. Immense tracts of forests or jungles would have to be cleared to bring the rest of the arable land on that continent to productive use. \n\nThus, only about one eighth of each imaginary plot of land distributed to each person is land which is under cultivation. In effect, each person has a piece of land about 26,000 square feet (a square 161 feet on each side or just a bit more than ½ an acre) at his or her disposal on which to grow all that he or she needs.
256680
Sand and bare rock cover only about one-fifth of the Sahara Desert. More than half of the Sahara is made up of soil known as yermosols that are shallow deposits over gravels and pebbles. These soils are no older than 50 million years. As recently as 5000 years ago the Sahara was probably not a desert, and may have supported vegetation such as savanna woodlands now present in eastern Africa. Prior to that wetter period it was probably a desert, according to some recent work on dating paleodunes in Chad.\n\nIt is a large region so it is easy to over generalize when trying to describe the geology. Much of the sand has originated from weathering of exposed Mesozoic and Paleozoic basement rocks. Several mountain ranges cut through the Sahara. In late Eocene the Tethys Sea had regressed from much of this area, likely leaving behind large deposits of sand and Cretaceous age sandstone that had been laid down while the area was beneath the sea. This probably accounts for much of the sand. Sedimentary deposits of sandstone have been once again eroded, reworked, and recycled. Most of the aeolian sand in the Sahara is considered to be Pleistocene and Holocene in age. \n\nThe sand is considered superficial by geologists working on understanding the underlying geomorphology. In the studies of the Selima Sand Sheet in the eastern Sahara, the sand was measured as from 1 to 6 meters in depth. In other areas where dunes have accumulated there are likely to be depths of sand of several hundred meters, however typical dunes are generally about ten meters in height, with some reaching 100 meters.