How big is big.......................?

The always interesting Via Meadia blog, the home of one of my favorite bloggers, Walter Russell Mead,  has a post up about China and water and big, big problems.  In said post can be found this excerpt:

"The Gobi desert is expanding by an area almost the size of Rhode Island every year."

Hmmm..............I don't know if that is a big deal or not.  As usually happens at times like this, the Oracle Google was consulted.   Here are a few tidbits:

The Gobi, at 500,000 + square miles, is the largest desert in Asia, but only the fifth largest on the planet.  Can you guess the largest?  If your first reaction was  "Sahara",  we both got it wrong.    Apparently sand is not a requirement for a desert.   The largest desert in the world is the Antarctic (at 5,339,573 square miles) and the second largest is the Arctic.  Next comes the Sahara, followed by the Arabian desert.    The tenth largest is the Great Basin, which covers most of Nevada and a goodly bit of Utah.

As it turns out, Rhode Island, the smallest state, only has 1,045 square miles of area.  Doesn't seem like that big a deal to add 1,045 to 500,000 every year.  Not much of a growth rate percentage wise.  Unless,  of course, you live there.  We live in Licking County, which has 688 square miles of area.   If some desert came and ate our county in a shade less than two years,  I would think that was a pretty big deal.