Im interested to know why Australia seems to have the largest continuous area of arid land (probably being the Sahara), and very little of it is green, arable land? I assume a lot of it has to do with weather patterns, but I’d love to know the specifics. Thanks!
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So the rotation of the earth create dominant winds (ore prevailing winds). I won’t go into the physics of why the rotation create this (it’s a bit more than ELI5), but the point is that the end result is [this](https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/prevailing-winds/).
From that picture you can kind of see what is happening. When dominant winds meet at 0 degree of latitude it create an accumulation of humidity which mean the land is greener. At latitude 30 N and S, the dominant winds are going away from each other pulling the humidity away and creating more dry climate. Australia is around 30 degrees S where the dominant winds are pulling the humidity away from it.
It’s more complicated than that, but it give you the overall picture. That’s why the desert are usually found at around 30 degrees of latitude South and North.
Really just the way it’s placed in the Southern Hemisphere. It is located in the subtropical zone, which receives the least amount of rainfall in the world. It’s also located in the rain shadow of the Great Dividing Range, which is a mountain range that blocks much of the moisture from the Pacific Ocean from reaching the continent. It’s also also located in an area surrounded by a lot of ocean which absorbs and evaporates much of the moisture from the atmosphere.
Between Antarctica and Australia, South America and South Africa there is just open ocean meaning the winds can circulate around Antarctica uninterrupted which changes the climate of Australia and if the ice melts in the Arctic and creates a similar gap in the oceans it could happen in the north as well and we might lose the largest area of forest in the world the Taiga. https://youtu.be/B3vcZZvvSmk
Cold currents on the west coast means very little water evaporates to make rain, and on the east coast a mountain range creates a rain shadow, which means those mountains are physically blocking all those rain-carrying clouds and winds from going inland, so on one side of the mountains you get a lot of rain, and on the other side you get hardly any.
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