The name of Lop Nur is "Po", but the inherent impression is that it is a desolate and mysterious desert area. It is uninhabited, and it is the place where our country and our country have conducted the most nuclear weapons tests, and many explorers have never returned here, making it a "forbidden place of life" that people are completely respected.
However, in recent years, a stream of green water has appeared in the real-life photos of Lop Nur and is completely desolation of the previous "Sea of Death", why does Lop Nur, which has dried up for many years, "come back from the dead"? How does this water come out of the desert?
Lop Nur was once the second largest saltwater lake in China, with an area of 5,350 square kilometers, and was once the largest lake in China. It is located at the eastern end of the Tarim Basin, and due to the trend of the Tarim Basin to be high in the west and low in the east, Lop Nur has become a water and salt storage center for the Tarim River and its many tributaries.
It has a long history, Guluobu Nur was born about 18 million years ago, the area can reach 20,000 square kilometers, and later with the uplift of the basin, Guluobu Nur was also divided into several depressions.
We can imagine the prosperity it once had: the lake was turquoise, and the white salt bands surrounded them, like pearls dotting the wasteland, full of life.
In the desert area, the river symbolizes life and civilization, and the famous Loulan Ancient Kingdom carried out agricultural life here, survived from generation to generation, and left a brilliant civilization.
However, the good times did not last long, and the people of Loulan had to face the drought brought about by the desert environment. Because the Tarim River is an inland river, the river sand content is very high, the river channel often migrates, the north and south swing, and the overall desert ecosystem is fragile, the self-regulation ability is limited, under the long-term consumption of human beings, the oasis conditions can not self-regulate, deteriorating year by year.
The people of Loulan made the greatest efforts to reduce the drought, not only to divert water from Dunhuang into Loulan, but also to issue a decree restricting the amount of water used, but this only slowed down the speed of Lop Nur drying up, but did not prevent it from stopping flow.
In the end, some people died here, and some abandoned the city and fled, leaving the famous ruins of the ancient city of Loulan here. In the last century, a famous Swedish archaeologist discovered a series of ancient tombs nearby, with more than 1,000 coffins buried under the sand, adding a cruel and mysterious color to Loulan and Lop Nur.
The situation in Lop Nur had a brief "warming" in 1921, when the fickle Tarim River was diverted again, and the river re-injected into Lop Nur from the east, moisturizing the originally rich and glorious land, and by 1958, the maximum area restored by Lop Nur could reach 5350 square kilometers.
At the same time, the wave of reclamation in China rose, and a large number of people migrated to the west to form the Construction Corps, and by 1966, the number of employees and relatives of the Corps had reached 1.485 million. This population of more than a million is spread on both sides of the Tarim River, and the demand for water has soared.
You know, Xinjiang's land area accounts for one-sixth of the country's area, but the surface water there is only 3% of the national water runoff.
In just a few years, more than 130 reservoirs have been built on the Tarim River, but nearly 400 kilometers downstream have been almost drained, and large tracts of lush poplar forests have died out, 58% less than in the 1950s.
Later, it also became an important test site for China's nuclear weapons development, with 45 nuclear tests before and after, and the first atomic bomb and the first hydrogen bomb were tested and detonated here. Most people are far away from Lop Nur and occasionally there are explorers or archaeologists who are not afraid of death, and most of them have never returned, which adds a layer of horror and desolation to it.
We may wish to think about it, is the reclamation of the construction corps correct? Since then, Xinjiang has had high-quality cotton, grain and fruit, and has also achieved considerable economic development, which is naturally correct.
So is the nuclear test worth it? With nuclear weapons, our country has obtained the ticket for "world power", which is naturally worth it.
However, when we think from the perspective of nature, it seems that we need deeper reflection. This kind of reclamation has seriously broken the ecological balance in the upper and lower reaches of the Tarim River, and the primitive vegetation and hundreds of species of wild animals that have lived for tens of thousands of years will disappear with it, and it is far more difficult to adjust this balance than to destroy it thousands of times.
If we have to pay a price in development, how many times can we afford to pay such a price?
Fortunately, people have now recognized the disaster of deforestation and the preciousness of water, and Lop Nur seems to have a trend of "reviving the dead" in recent years. So, where does its water in the desert come from?
Coincidentally, due to the topography of Lop Nur, not only water but also a lot of salt will be stored here. Water is lost due to geological changes, but salt is left behind, accumulating over thousands of years into rich mineral deposits. These lakes are the saline bodies of water under the Lop Nur area, also known as natural brine.
The main content of these natural brines is potassium salt, 95% of which is used in fertilizer manufacturing and 5% for industry, which is indispensable to China, a large agricultural country. Unfortunately, China's potash resources reserves are not large, often difficult to meet the annual demand, potash has been listed as one of the country's urgent shortage of minerals.
As a result, the mining of Lop Nur potash became an urgent matter. Since 2000, Xinjiang Lop Nur Potash Co., Ltd. began to develop local resources, geological exploration team in Lop Nur to establish a number of pumping equipment, 20 years later, Lop Nur has become the world's largest potassium sulfate production base, China's potash scarcity has also been greatly alleviated.
Therefore, the "blue waves" we see are actually the saltwater lakes left by potash mining, which currently contain too much salt and organisms cannot survive in them.
There is no shortage of opponents of this, because the potash salt of Lop Nur is stored in the ground in the form of groundwater, and those who are worried that the large amount of groundwater pumped may repeat the same mistakes and cause irreversible damage to the local ecology.
This fear is not unreasonable, but now with the progress of consciousness, we will no longer develop the economy with the destruction of the environment as in the past. Modern technology can help the brine to purify, not only can extract the salt inside, obtain economic value, but also transform the brine into ordinary fresh water, to establish a suitable environment for plant growth.
As part of our national territory, Lop Nur has a responsibility to make some redress for the place that has been destroyed. As the saying goes, the golden mountains and silver mountains are not as good as the green waters and green mountains, and whether we can make Lop Nur bloom green again in the future is a topic that we always need to pay attention to.