Kyrgyzstan’s “hot lake” is the world’s second-largest mountain lake
Issyk-Kul—Ysyk-Köl, “Hot Lake” in Kyrgyz—is an endorheic saline lake in eastern Kyrgyzstan’s western Tian Shan. Eighth-deepest on Earth and second-largest mountain lake after Titicaca, it stretches 182 kilometres long and up to 60 wide across 6,236 square kilometres at 1,607 metres elevation.
It plunges to 668 metres and ranks eleventh in the world by volume and second among saline lakes. Salt content of about 0.6 percent, far below seawater’s 3.5, is still enough that the lake seldom freezes despite harsh winters. Some 118 rivers and streams pour in, led by the Jyrgalang and Tüp, along with hot springs and snowmelt, but nothing flows out, although some hydrologists think water seeps underground to the Chu. Its bed holds monohydrocalcite, a mineral rarely deposited in lakes. The Teskey Ala-Too rises on the south shore and the Kungey Alatau on the north.
Today’s surface stands roughly 8 metres above its medieval level yet is falling about 5 centimetres a year because of diversions. Divers have found drowned settlements; Toru-Aygyr, founded in the thirteenth century, sank after fifteenth-century earthquakes. Finds underwater include gold rings used as small change, claimed as the oldest surviving coins, and a finely made bronze cauldron.
The lake served as a Silk Road stop, and Xuanzang described it in the seventh century. Qing records called it Temurtu-Nor, Iron Lake, before it passed to Russia under the Treaty of Tarbagatai. DNA from graves near its shores, analysed in 2022, showed the Black Death present in 1338 or 1339, eight years before the pandemic swept Eurasia. The Soviet navy tested torpedoes at the eastern end, and in 2008 Russia leased land on the Karabulan Peninsula for $4.5 million a year.
Kyrgyzstan created its first nature reserve here in 1948, the lake became a Ramsar site in 1975 and a UNESCO biosphere reserve followed in 2000. Four endemic fish are listed as threatened, pressured by overfishing and introduced pike perch and rainbow trout; Sevan trout arrived from Armenia in the 1970s. Soviet-era sanatoria cluster around Cholpon-Ata, and Karakol, once Przhevalsk, has a Dungan mosque built without metal nails.
Source: Issyk-Kul
