The Arabian Desert is Asia's largest desert

Good morning

On 20 October 1944, American troops landed on Leyte, an island in the Philippines. It was the start of a campaign to take the country back from Japanese occupation. The commander, General Douglas MacArthur, waded ashore and kept a promise he had made two years before: "I have returned."

Today's issue looks at deserts, borders and distant points on the map, from Asia's largest desert to the westernmost tip of Africa.

In today's edition

Arabian Desert · Fact of the day

Asia's largest desert is the Arabian Desert, not the Gobi

Ask most people to name Asia's biggest desert and they will say the Gobi, the dry expanse that stretches across Mongolia and northern China. The Gobi is indeed huge, at about 1,295,000 square kilometres, and it is the largest desert in East Asia.

But Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman and their neighbours sit in Asia too, even though we often group them under the separate label "Middle East". Together their desert, the Arabian Desert, covers about 2,330,000 square kilometres, roughly 1.8 times the size of the Gobi. It even reaches past the famous sand sea of the Empty Quarter into gravel plains further north. Once it is counted, it beats the Gobi by a wide margin, and ranks second in the world only to the Sahara.

14.74° N, 17.53° W · Place of the day

Pointe des Almadies, Senegal

Pointe des Almadies is a headland on the Cap-Vert peninsula in Senegal, a country on the Atlantic coast of West Africa. It is part of Dakar, Senegal's capital, and it marks the westernmost point of mainland Africa.

Most people picture Africa as lying south of Europe, so they rarely check which continent reaches further west. Mainland Europe's westernmost point, Cabo da Roca in Portugal, sits about 700 kilometres further east than Pointe des Almadies. That means all of continental Europe, including the tip of Ireland, lies to the east of Dakar.

Stand on this headland and the nearest land in a straight line west is Brazil, across the open Atlantic.

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↻ Also on the map

Between issues

Fancy a different kind of puzzle before tomorrow's issue? GeoGrid gives you a 3 by 3 grid and nine categories to match: countries with deserts, countries on a certain sea, countries with a certain flag colour. Fill every square and see how your knowledge of the map holds up.

Play today's GeoGrid

4.53° N, 114.73° E · By the numbers

Brunei's land and people, split in two

Brunei, a small country on the island of Borneo, is not one piece of land. Malaysia's Limbang district cuts straight through it, separating the eastern district of Temburong from the rest of the country. Temburong covers close to a quarter of Brunei's land, an area a little larger than Malta. Yet only about 2 in every 100 Bruneians live there. Until a bridge opened across Brunei Bay in 2020, reaching Temburong from the capital meant driving through four border checkpoints in Malaysia. It matters because a country's land and its people do not always spread out evenly.