The Age of the Taklimakan Desert , Science 2006, v.312, 1621.

    The Taklimakan Desert is the world’s second largest shifting sand desert. There are many different opinions about the age of the Taklimakan Desert, ranging from the middle Pliocene of 3.5 million years to the middle Pleistocene of about half million years or the late Pleistocene of tens of thousands of years. Jimin Sun and his group, from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, studied the thick Cenozoic deposits in the northern forebasin of the Kunlun Mountains, and their results demonstrate that the Taklimakan Desert occurred at least at 5.3 million years ago. This new opinion was published in the journal of “Science” in 2006.