Gogue Desert

The Gogue desert is located on the planet Chooz and is home to the village of Dabooldagad.

Topography and Geology
The desert stretches for a thousand miles in every direction. Most of it is dry sand in shades of grey and black and green, interrupted only by outcroppings of the rock from which the winds have, over the millennia, created the sand. Some of the rocks are just the right size to fit in the hand, as if they had been made for throwing; some are big enough to be called mountains, and most are somewhere in between. Besides the rocks, two features dot the otherwise monotonous landscape of shifting sand: the oases that foster life and the volcanoes that take it away.

The oases aren't, for the most part, bountiful springs of water that make the land green with the lushness of luxuriant vegetation. They are modest underground aquifers, rather close to the surface, making possible the growth of cacti and scrub grasses that in turn support a modest number of animals.

The volcanoes, also, aren't like the great cinder cones found in other places. They are neither tall nor steep nor round, and never once, in all of recorded history, has even one erupted in that exploding-mountain way that volcanoes are known for.

And they never will, either, say the geologists, because they can't. Only magma rich in silica can build up pressure for huge explosions, because silica makes the magma thick and gloppy, trapping the volcanic gases and holding in the pressure, saving it up for sometimes hundreds of years until one day it reaches its limit, puts on a breathtaking show and causes horrible devastation. The magma under the Gogue desert, though, is made mostly of pyroxenite and olivine, very low in silica and therefore very liquid when melted. Gases escape easily through cracks in the overlying bedrock, and occasionally lava gushes out, too, and forms glowing red rivers which eventually cool into solid black and green rock.

Long ago, the experts say, the Gogue desert was the Gogue rainforest.