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The Great Indian Desert — a sea of wind-built sand on the northwestern margin of the subcontinent.
The Thar is an aeolian landscape of shifting dunes and sandy plains, built over the Quaternary as monsoon winds reworked river and coastal sediment. It marks the arid edge of the monsoon, where the rains fail against the grain of the Aravallis.
Beneath the sand lie the salt lakes and the buried courses of vanished rivers, and along its margin run the Luni — the only sizeable river to cross it — and the fossil water that sustains desert life.
Sources
- Geological Survey of India