The mystery of the disappearance of lop Nur

The ancient Lop Nur was born at the end of Tertiary and the beginning of Quaternary, covering an area of more than 20,000 square kilometers. Under the influence of neotectonic movement, the lake basin tilted from south to north and was divided into many depressions. Here used to be the ancient kingdom of Loulan, with a large population and considerable scale. In BC 126, Zhang Qian returned from his mission to the Western Regions, and wrote to Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty: "Loulan, there are battlements in Sicheng, which are near the salt flats". It has become the throat gateway of the south branch of the famous Silk Road. Once upon a time, the bustling Loulan quietly withdrew from the historical stage; In the heyday of the Southern Silk Road, yellow sand was everywhere and the journey was full of feet; Lop Nur, a misty lake, has also become a dry salt marsh. Lop Nur, now reflected from satellite photos, is a desert composed of salt shells! It is a living example of the disappearance of lakes, warning people that protecting the ecological environment must be the primary goal of the development of ecologically fragile areas in the west.

The population on both sides of the Tarim River has soared, and the demand for water has also increased. The expanded cultivated land needs water, and so does the exploitation of mineral resources. Where does the water come from? People desperately asked the Tarim River for water. Over the past decades, more than 30 reservoirs, 65,438 water intakes and more than 400 pumping stations have been built in the Tarim River Basin. Some pumping stations will pump more than 10000 cubic meters a day. Blindly using water like a sucker, the Tarim River was finally drained, which caused the Tarim River to shrink from 1, 32 1 km in the 1960s to 1, 000 km, and the 320 km channel dried up, threatening more than 50,000 mu of cultivated land along the coast. Lop Nur, without water, immediately became a dead lake, a dry lake. After Lop Nur dried up, the surrounding ecological environment immediately changed dramatically, all the herbs died, and Hu Yangshu, the defender of sand control, died in pieces, and the desert pushed into the lake at a rate of 3 to 5 meters per year. Lop Nur soon merged with the vast Taklimakan desert. In the 1970s, Lop Nur disappeared completely, and since then Lop Nur has become a horrible place. The following is a description of Lop Nur in the past dynasties: Lop Nur in the Han Dynasty was "300 miles vast, and the water pavilion lived in winter and summer, neither increasing nor decreasing", and its richness made people guess that it "sneaked underground, and the south also accumulated stones into the Hua River". This view of mistaking Lop Nur as the source of the upper reaches of the Yellow River has been circulating for more than 2,000 years from pre-Qin to late Qing Dynasty.

In the 4th century AD, Loulan in the west of Lop Nur, which was once a "big wave scouring sand, was bound to flood", was in a tight situation and restricted water use by law.

At the end of the Qing Dynasty, when Lop Nur rose, it was only a small lake with "eight or nine miles from east to west and two or three miles from north to south".

192 1 year, Tarim River diverted eastward and flowed into Lop Nur. By the 1950s, the area of the lake had reached more than 2,000 square kilometers.

In 1960s and 1970s, Lop Nur gradually dried up due to the cut-off of the lower reaches of Tarim River and Shule River, and completely dried up by the end of 1972. Historically, the largest area of Lop Nur was 5350 square kilometers. In the 20th year of the Republic of China (193 1), the area measured by Chen Zongqi and others was 1900 square kilometers.

3 1 year (194 1 year). On the topographic map of1500,000 made by the Soviet Union, the measured area is 3,006 square kilometers.

1958 The provincial map of China covers an area of 2,570 square kilometers.

1962, on the topographic map of aerial survey1200,000, its area is 660 square kilometers.

1972, the last trunk part is 450 square kilometers.

In modern times, some foreigners who entered Lop Nur described Lop Nur as a "wandering lake".

In the Qing Dynasty, Amitabha went deep into the lake area to inspect, and wrote in Volume 9 "A Brief Introduction to Heyuan": "Lobnur is a big river in the western regions, which is surrounded by mountains and rivers in the north of the Near East in the western regions, with six or seven tributaries, 5,000 cotton fields and 4,500 miles of flowing water. The rest of the sand is separated, and the hidden sand is not counted. Written by the mountain, all twists and turns in the ring tend to return to Naoer, hundreds of miles from east to west, hundreds of miles from north to south, not shrinking in winter and summer ... "