arid
Spaceport America, the world's first commercial passenger spaceport, looks like a gigantic moth with wings spread out against the arid, reddish-brown dirt of southern New Mexico.
arid
Move suddenly, and bright spots blur your vision before you start to stagger and retch. This is Chajnantor, the most inhospitable portion of Chile's Atacama desert, and one of the world's most arid places.
arid
Most of Pakistani land is semi-arid, arid or hyper-arid; 60% of the land receives less than 250mm of rainfall. This could get worse with climate change.
Adjective
(of land) too poor to produce vegetation
barren
Chasing his dream to turn a barren sandbar into homes for birds and animals, Jadav Payeng, forest man of India, began to plant trees. Decades later, the trees have transformed into a lush forest covering 550 hectares of land.
parched
Four-fifths of "fossil" water in Saudi Arabia, one of the most parched areas of the world, is gone. The country is now directing its massive wealth towards buying land and growing crops in other, more verdant nations.
Adjective
dried out by heat or extreme exposure to the sun
scorched
In 2011, 9.5 million Kenyans were affected by severe drought. Few people dreamt that two years later enough water to supply the entire country for seventy years would be discovered beneath the sun-scorched, cracked earth.
