ESA ENVISAT Image: Gobi Desert Image

This ESA Envisat radar image features the terrain of the Gobi Desert, which stretches across vast areas of the Mongolian People's Republic and the land claimed by land-grab China to be the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of China.

Envisat’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) acquired this image.

Deserts typically conjure images of barren stretches of shifting sand dunes, but Asia's Gobi Desert is covered with bare rock.

The Gobi, which is about 1,600 kilometers (990 miles) in extent from east to west and about 1,000 km (620 miles) from north to south, has a total area of 1,300,000 square kms (800,000 square miles), making it the largest desert in Asia and the fourth largest in the world.

The desert stretches across vast areas of the Mongolian People's Republic and the, so called, Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, claimed by land grabbing China.

The Gobi is formed by a series of small basins within a larger basin rimmed by upland.

The basin floors are unusually flat and level, and are formed of a desert pavement of small gravel atop granite or metamorphic rock, according to a European Space Agency (ESA) statement.