Mongolia's geography: a high plateau measured in pasture

How high and how far inland Mongolia lies

Mongolia is a plateau. Britannica gives its average elevation as about 1,580 metres and places it between 41° and 52° north, roughly oval, 2,392 kilometres from west to east and at most 1,259 kilometres from north to south. Its nearest point to the sea is about 700 kilometres from the Bo Hai by Britannica's measure; the Wikipedia article on the country's geography gives about 645 kilometres from the easternmost tip to the coast at Jinzhou. Britannica attributes the country's continental climate to that distance together with the latitude and the height.

Britannica divides the surface into mountain chains across the north and west with basins tucked among them, and a broad upland plateau across the south and east. The whole country is seismically active, and hot springs and extinct volcanoes cluster in the north and west. The land slopes overall from the high west and north down to the plains and depressions of the east and south.

Where the mountain chains run

Three chains carry most of the relief, and a fourth closes the north.

The Mongolian Altai is the one range where glaciers still form. East of it the Gobi Altai breaks down into eroded hills that disappear into the desert. The Khangai is older and lower, with gentle slopes under pasture and forest, and its crest is the watershed between the rivers that reach an ocean and those that do not. The Khentii, about 400 kilometres long, divides the Arctic basin from the Pacific basin; the Onon, the Kherlen and the Tuul rise there, and Ulaanbaatar lies at its south-western edge.

Between the ranges sit the basins. The Great Lakes depression in the west holds more than 300 lakes. The Khorgo area on the northern flank of the Khangai has a dozen extinct volcanoes and volcanic lakes, and the Dariganga area of the far east has some 220 extinct volcanic cones.

Where Mongolia's water drains

The north drains outward. The Selenge and the Orkhon carry water north into Russia and Lake Baikal and so to the Arctic Ocean; the Orkhon, about 1,130 kilometres long, lies wholly inside the country. The Kherlen runs east into Lake Hulun in China, and the Onon joins the Amur system to the Pacific. Britannica counts the western and southern two-thirds of the country as interior basins, where seasonal streams end in salt lakes or in the sand. The two largest rivers of that interior are the Khovd, which rises in the glaciers of the Mongolian Altai, and the Zavkhan, which runs off the southern slopes of the Khangai; both end in the lakes of the Great Lakes depression, and the rivers east of the Zavkhan end in salt lakes or disappear into the Gobi.

Lake Khövsgöl in the north fills a structural depression and empties through the Eg River into the Selenge. Lake Uvs in the west is saline and covers some 3,350 square kilometres. Lake Khar Us is fresh and drains into the saline Khyargas. Lakes and rivers together cover 10,560 square kilometres, or 0.67% of the country, by the Wikipedia count. Britannica adds that steep, fast rivers, slow meandering ones and erratic rain have made hydroelectric power hard to develop.

What the word gobi actually describes

A gobi, in Mongolian usage, is a type of rangeland and only sometimes a desert: dry country with too little vegetation to support marmots but enough for camels. Mongols distinguish it from true desert, which the Wikipedia geography article describes as a stony waste where even Bactrian camels cannot live. The two are linked by grazing. Gobi rangeland is fragile, and overgrazing turns it into the second kind.

The Gobi as a whole covers about 1,295,000 square kilometres across Mongolia and China. On the Mongolian side, Britannica describes most of the south as a vast plain with occasional oases, broken by low eroded ranges, clusters of six-sided basalt columns and the Gurvan Saikhan range. Yolyn Am, a gorge in that range, keeps a small perennial glacier. The range is known for dinosaur fossils from Bayanzag and Nemegt, and the Wikipedia article on the Gobi records the first dinosaur eggs to be found, 26 of them, uncovered in the desert in 1923.

The soil follows the same gradient. Britannica describes chestnut and brown soils over most of the country, with heavy salinisation in the semideserts and deserts, and the Gobi itself as rock-floored, with large areas of gravel and occasional dunes.

How far Mongolian temperatures swing

Britannica records a difference of up to 44 °C between mean January and July temperatures and swings of up to 30 °C in a single day. In winter the land sits under the Siberian anticyclone. Mean temperatures around Ulaanbaatar run from about −22 °C in January to 17 °C in July, and in the Gobi from −15 °C to 21 °C. The British government's travel advice gives a range from +35 °C in summer to −40 °C on winter nights. Most of the country lies on discontinuous permafrost, and every river and freshwater lake freezes in winter.

Rain falls mostly as summer thunderstorms. Britannica gives under 100 millimetres a year in the low desert of the south and west, about 350 in the northern mountains and about 250 at Ulaanbaatar; the Wikipedia geography article gives Ulaanbaatar about 310 millimetres, almost all of it in July and August. Clear days average between 220 and 260 a year. Dust storms, hail and blizzards arrive suddenly, and the British advice notes warnings all year for floods, dust storms, heavy snow, high winds and heat.

What a zud does to the herds

A zud is a winter in which livestock cannot graze and die in large numbers, whether from blizzards, drought, extreme cold or freezing rain. Britannica notes that even a thin layer of ice can keep animals from their pasture. The Wikipedia article records zuds of exceptional severity in 1970 to 1971, 2000 to 2001, 2008 to 2009 and 2009 to 2010, and puts the losses of the last at 8,000,000 animals and 60 people. The World Bank attributes a sharp contraction in agriculture in 2024 to a severe dzud, and the OSCE election observers reported that the winters of 2023 and 2024 deepened hardship for rural herders.

Height decides where the cold settles. In winter a shallow layer of cold, heavy Siberian air collects in the river valleys and low basins, while the slopes above stay warmer, an inversion in which temperature rises with altitude. A pocket of the central and eastern Arkhangai and the north of Övörkhangai, sheltered by the Khangai, has January temperatures as high as the warmest desert districts to the south and steadier. At Tsetserleg, the warmest town in it, January nights rarely fall below −30 °C and January days often reach 0 to 5 °C.

How the herds are spread across the pasture

Pasture is grazed by what Mongolians call the five animals, tavan khoshuu mal: sheep, goats, cattle, horses and camels. Britannica says livestock raising accounts for some four-fifths of the value of farm production, and that the domesticated animals collectively far outnumber the people. The herders were organised into cooperatives, the negdel, mostly between 1955 and 1959; the cooperatives were dissolved in the reforms after 1990 and the animals passed into private hands, while the pastures stayed the property of the state. The price of cashmere then pushed goats up to the most numerous of the five, and the herds grew in total.

The mix follows the land. Camels, goats and sheep live off the thin vegetation of the semidesert, camels still carry loads there, yaks and oxen do the same work on the steppe, and in the far north the Tsaatan keep small herds of reindeer. Crops are a narrow exception. Only about 1% of the land is sown, mostly in the lower Orkhon and Selenge valleys, and the long winter allows a single crop a year, three-quarters of it spring wheat with some barley and oats. Most provinces cut hay for winter feed and keep emergency stockpiles against a zud.

The UNESCO description of the Orkhon Valley treats this pattern as part of the landscape it protects: herders still move their flocks across the valley grassland in seasonal transhumance, and the threats it names are a falling water table from tree-cutting and mining, polluted watercourses and overgrazing.

Which belts of plants and animals cross the country

Four vegetation zones run in bands from north to south and from the mountains down to the basins: forest-steppe, steppe, semidesert and desert, with taiga and an alpine belt on the high ranges. Steppe covers more than three-quarters of the territory, by Britannica's account, in feather grass, couch grass and wormwood. The northern slopes carry Siberian larch, Siberian cedar, spruce, pine and fir. Saxaul in the semidesert is cut for firewood, and elms and poplars gather at springs.

Wildlife follows the same bands. Lynx, maral, musk deer, sable and brown bear live in the northern forests; marmots and the Mongolian gazelle on the steppe; argali and snow leopard in the Altai. Kulan, wild camels, known as khavtgai, and Gobi bears, called mazaalai, survive around desert water holes. The takhi, Przewalski's horse, died out in the wild and was reintroduced from European and North American stock. Rivers and fresh lakes hold some 70 fish species.

Two natural properties carry this onto the World Heritage List. The Uvs Nuur Basin, inscribed in 2003 and shared with the Tuva Republic of Russia, has seven components in Mongolia covering 810,234 hectares, from cold desert to tundra around a saline lake at about 800 metres; UNESCO counts more than 550 higher plants in it. The Landscapes of Dauria, inscribed in 2017, are the second.

Where people live on all this land

Settlement follows the water. Britannica describes densities of up to four people per square kilometre in the Orkhon and Selenge basins and some uninhabited desert. The north-central region holds the richest pasture, the main crop area and most of the industry. Official statistics count less than 1% of the land as arable and 8 to 10% as forest, with the rest pasture or desert.

The towns grew from about a quarter of the population in 1950 to more than half by the early 1980s. In 2020, 47.6% of the population lived in Ulaanbaatar, on the Tuul at about 1,350 metres, and another 21.4% in Darkhan, Erdenet and the provincial and district centres, leaving 31% in rural areas. The country is divided into 21 provinces, the aimags, and 330 districts, the sums, with the capital administered separately. Families who left the countryside after 1990 settled in ger districts on the edges of the towns, and the British government's travel advice warns of high air pollution in Ulaanbaatar in winter.