Gobi, a term first noted on a French map in 1706, is defined in many different ways: as a gravel landscape without water, as a ‘treeless terrain without marmots and little surface water’, as a desert area waiting to be watered.
The landscape commonly known as ‘Gobi’ stretches 3,000 miles along Mongolia’s southern border and extends to parts of the far northwest, running between the Altai and the Khangai mountain ranges, as well as south into northern China. Principally the Gobi spans six Mongolian provinces (aimags): Ömnögobi, Dornogobi, Dundgobi, Bayankhongor, Gobi-Sümber and Gobi-Altai. It is a wide- open place of huge extremes: mostly it is one huge gravel plain quite unlike any other desert on earth.