Australian Desert refers to three deserts that cover most of western and central Australia. The deserts are the Great Sandy Desert, the Gibson Desert, and the Great Victoria Desert. The three deserts are not as dry as most other deserts, and they have a thin cover of vegetation. The Great Sandy Desert stretches south to the Gibson Desert. It covers about 110,000 square miles (285,000 square kilometers). Peter Egerton Warburton first walked over it in 1873. That same year, Ernest Giles became the first European to reach the 60,000-square-mile (156,000-square-kilometer) Gibson Desert. The Great Victoria Desert runs south from the Gibson Desert to the Nullarbor Plain.
