But adventurers and the occasional scientist who traveled into the Lut had spotted diverse animal life, including insects, reptiles, and desert foxes.
The interior of the desert, an area nearly as big as West Virginia, is mostly devoid of plant life. Many researchers had assumed that the Lut Desert is too hostile to sustain life, says Hossein Akhani, a plant biologist at the University of Tehran. These modern explorers from Iran, the United States, and Europe were drawn not so much by the exotic landscape as by the puzzle of its unusual ecosystem. Last month, a convoy of five SUVs carried 10 researchers and their guides, along with cameras, instruments, and hundreds of liters of water and fuel, into the heart of the desert. Near the end of the 3-week journey, even their parched camels had had enough: "Their legs trembled they panted, knelt down, and sometimes crept along on their knees." "For several anxious hours we lay, motionless and helpless, outstretched on the ground." Later, the voyagers were disoriented by mirages that were most vivid when the air was coolest, just before sunrise. Late one afternoon, Gabriel recounted, "the landscape darkened under red clouds … and a noise like the roaring of the sea began." The dust storm raged into the night. He described his experiences a year later in a spellbinding talk to the Royal Geographical Society in London. In March 1937, Gabriel finally conquered the central Lut-and barely made it out alive. But a "confused mass of impassable tangled dunes" stymied his efforts to probe the interior of the Lut Desert, a tract of sand and fantastical rock formations in southeastern Iran that was said to be the hottest place on Earth. Gabriel had crisscrossed arid parts of the Middle East, Pakistan, and Afghanistan by camel, observing and mapping areas into which few dared venture-lands with names such as Dasht-i-Naumid (the Desert without Hope) and Dasht-i-Margo (the Desert of Death). During the 1920s and 1930s, Viennese physician and adventurer Alfons Gabriel fell under the spell of Iran's Lut Desert.