When is the best time to go to Lop Nur, Urumqi?

The best time to visit Lop Nur in Urumqi: June to September

Lop Nur is located at the eastern end of the Tarim Basin. In satellite photos, you can see circles shaped like the outline of an ear. The ancient relics of the shore are a piece of land full of mystery in our country's 9.6 million square kilometers of land.

Lop Nur was originally the largest lake in Xinjiang, also known as Lop Nur. Lobu Nur is a Mongolian transliteration of the name, which means a lake where many waters gather. The "Book of Han" written in the first century describes it as extending for three hundred miles, with water pavilions that do not increase or decrease in winter or summer. The Book of Mountains and Seas during the Warring States Period called it Juze; the Hanshu Biography of the Western Regions also called it Puleihai, saying it was three hundred miles wide, meaning it could be up to 300 miles long or wide. This range coincides with the outermost lake embankment of Big Ear seen in satellite photos, covering an area of ??at least five to six thousand square kilometers. By the Northern Wei Dynasty, the lake surface had shrunk and became nearly circular. "Shui Jing Zhu" states that it is more than 400 miles wide, which is comparable to the shape of the lake embankment in the middle of the satellite photo. During the Sui and Tang Dynasties, the lake shrank further, and the "Shazhou Illustrated Book" records it as Zhou Guang 400. At the end of the Wei Dynasty, it was further reduced to eighty or ninety miles from east to west (explored by Liu Qinghe and others). The "Landform of Xinjiang" in 1942 recorded an area of ??2,520 square kilometers. By 1966, it was only 100 kilometers long from north to south and only 3 to 16 kilometers wide from east to west ("Desert Control Research").

Lop Nur is the terminal lake of the Tarim River, Kongque River and Shule River, and its water source mainly depends on the supply of these rivers. The reason why Lop Nur is drying up is due to the redistribution of river runoff by human economic activities. Since the middle of the Western Han Dynasty, farming has been carried out in the middle and upper reaches of these rivers, and a large amount of water has been diverted for irrigation, resulting in a gradual decrease in the amount of water injected into the lakes. Especially after liberation, large-scale land reclamation was carried out, and the amount of water discharged from rivers dropped sharply. The Tarim River stopped flowing when it reached Arakan, the Kongque River gradually dried up when it reached Yingpan, and the Shule River had already dried up as early as the middle of the Qing Dynasty. There is no aftermath to supply Lop Nur, causing it to become a completely dry world.

In the Qing Dynasty, Amida went deep into the lake area to investigate and wrote the ninth volume of "Heyuan Jingtian Name": Luobu Nur is a giant swamp in the Western Region, located in the near east and north of the Western Region, and receives many mountains and rivers in the west. ** * Sixty-seven branches, five thousand stretches of land, and four thousand five hundred miles of meridians. The rest are separated by sand, and those that are latent and invisible are not counted. It is written based on the mountain topography, and all the twists and turns lead back to Nao'er. Nao'er is more than a hundred miles east to west and more than a hundred miles northwest. It neither grows nor shrinks in winter and summer

The geographer Xu Song wrote in "The Waterways of the Western Regions" The illustration indicates that the Tarim River flows into the Kongque River and flows down to Lop Nur. The Italian businessman Marco Polo, the Russian explorer HM Przewalski, the Swedish geographer Sven Hedin, the American Godington, the British Stein, the Japanese Ju Ruichao and the French Bonvalot all visited Lop Nur. , and left a wonderful description.

From 1930 to 1934, Chinese scientists Huang Wenbi and Chen Chongqi went to Lop Nur for field inspections and made actual maps. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences organized large-scale inspections of Lop Nur in 1959 and 1980-1981.

The mystery of Lop Nur lies first in the unique harsh environment here. The intense heat, drought, windy sand, Yadan, and salt crust prevent people from approaching it, covering Lop Nur with layers of mysterious curtains.

Here, the annual precipitation is less than 10 millimeters, and in some places even a drop of water does not fall for several years, but the evaporation is as high as more than 3,000 millimeters, hundreds of times more than the precipitation!