The district, and the town, derives its name from Thar' and ‘Parkar’: the name 'Thar is from “Thul”, the general term for the regional sand ridges, and Parkar literally means to cross over. It was earlier known as Thar and Parkar District, but later became one word Tharparkar.
The Thar region forms part of the bigger desert of the same name that sprawls over a vast area of Pakistan and India from Cholistan to Nagarparkar in Pakistan and from the south of Haryana down to Rajasthan in India.
The Tharparkar district is mostly desert and consist of barren tracts of sand dunes covered with thorny bushes. The ridges are irregular and roughly parallel, that they often enclosed sheltered valleys, above which they rise to a height of some 46 meters. These valleys are moist enough to admit cultivation and when not cultivated they yield luxuriant crops of rank grass. But the extraordinary salinity of the subsoil and consequent shortage of potable water renders many tracts quite uninhabitable. In many of the valleys the subsoil water collects and forms large and picturesque salt lakes, which rarely dry up.
The only hills in the district are at Nagarparkar on the northern edge of the Rann of Kutch, which belongs to quite a different geological series. It consists of granite rocks, probably an outlying mass of the crystalline rocks of the Aravalli Range. The Aravalli series belongs to Archean system which constitutes the oldest rocks of the earth’s crust. This is a small area quite different from the desert. The tract is flat and level except close to Nagarparkar itself. The principal range, Karoonjhar Mountains, is 19 km in length and attains a height of 305 m. Smaller hills rise in the east, which are covered with sparse jungle and pasturage and give rise to two perennial springs named Achleshwar and Sardharo as well as temporary streams called Bhetiani and Gordhro, after the rains.
