Karakul Lake — lake
Image by Makalu from Pixabay

Karakul Lake

  • Elevation3,900 m
  • 2 min read
  • 39.040° N 73.420° E
  • UNESCO World Heritage
  • UNESCO natural beauty

Interesting facts

  • The age of the impact crater is still debated: early estimates put it at about 25 million years, while later work suggests it is younger than 5 million years.
  • The lake's only fish, a small loach, is named Triplophysa lacusnigri, a scientific name meaning roughly the loach of the black lake.
  • The lake freezes from about late November to April, and by February the ice can be more than a metre thick.
  • The island off the northern shore is about 8 kilometres long and 4 kilometres wide, and a strait only about a kilometre wide links the two basins.
  • Even in summer the water warms only to about 12 °C, and it is clear enough to see some 9 metres down.
  • The water is bitter and salty rather than fresh, with roughly 1.2 to 1.6 grams of dissolved salts per litre.

Why it is worth it

Karakul is a great sheet of blue water lying at 3,960 metres in the high, bare plateau of the eastern Pamirs, ringed by snow peaks and almost without vegetation. Its name means "black lake" in Kyrgyz. It covers about 380 square kilometres and sits inside a circular basin some 52 kilometres across that geologists identified from satellite images around 1987 as an impact crater.

A peninsula reaching out from the southern shore and an island off the northern shore divide the lake into two very different basins. The eastern one is shallow, about 13 to 19 metres deep, while the western basin plunges to around 230 metres. Karakul has no outlet, and its water is brackish; after the last ice age its level stood some 35 metres higher than today. Only one species of fish, a loach of the genus Triplophysa, lives in it. The lake is a Ramsar wetland, listed in 2001, and an Important Bird Area for migratory and breeding birds, and it lies within Tajik National Park.

On the eastern shore is the small village of Karakul, one of the very few settlements on this stretch of the Pamir Highway. The road passes the lake between the Ak-Baital Pass, at 4,655 metres, to the south and the Kyzyl-Art Pass, at 4,250 metres, which carries it over the border into Kyrgyzstan to the north. Between 2014 and 2017 the lake hosted the "Roof of the World Regatta", billed as the highest sailing event in the world.

Getting there

Karakul lies on the Pamir Highway (M41) in Gorno-Badakhshan, eastern Tajikistan. The nearest airport in a straight line is Osh International Airport (OSS) in Kyrgyzstan, about 182 km away; the road from Osh reaches the lake over the Kyzyl-Art Pass and its border crossing. Within Tajikistan, the nearest city is Khorugh, about 237 km away in a straight line, reached via Murghab and the Ak-Baital Pass, and the nearest airport is Kulob International Airport (TJU), about 336 km away.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Tajikistan 5The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Lakes 7The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Nature Sanctuaries 43The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Gardens, Parks and Forests 61The UNESCO Sites of Exceptional Natural Beauty 77The Most Beautiful Nature Sanctuaries 91The Most Beautiful Lakes 105The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests 232The Most Beautiful Water Wonders 429The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

Karakul or Qarokul is an endorheic lake, 25 km (16 mi) in diameter, located within a 52 km (32 mi) impact crater. It is located in the Tajik National Park in the Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

39.04000, 73.42000per Wikidata