Turkmen “black sand” covers seventy percent of a nation
The Karakum—Qaraqum or Garagum, Turkmen for “Black Sand”—is Earth’s twelfth-largest desert, occupying about seventy percent of Turkmenistan in a long east–west belt east of the Caspian. Sparse settlement averages one person per 6.5 square kilometres; rain falls only 70–150 millimetres a year.
The black of the name comes from shale-rich sand lying under the surface. Spread over roughly 350,000 square kilometres, the desert meets the Amu Darya delta on its northern side, and that river marks the long frontier with Uzbekistan’s Kyzylkum. Geographers split it into three parts: the raised Trans-Unguz plateau in the north, the low Central Karakum, and a southeastern zone strung with salt marshes. Since the early 1980s a newer offshoot, the Aralkum, has spread across some 40,000 square kilometres of dried Aral seabed.
In the late Pleistocene the Amu Darya ran past the Aral basin to Sarykamysh Lake and on to the Caspian. Rivers still feed the south: the Murghab and Tejen descend from the Hindu Kush and fade into the sand, watering fields, and the oases of Mary and Tejen are known for cotton. Built between 1954 and 1958, the Karakum Canal carries 13 to 20 cubic kilometres a year over 1,375 kilometres from the Amu Darya, the second-largest irrigation channel on Earth.
Since 1971 the Darvaza crater, which locals call the Door to Hell, has burned natural gas nonstop and draws hundreds of tourists annually; the region holds large oil and gas reserves. The Trans-Caspian Railway crosses the sands, and Stone Age human remains have turned up in the Uly Balkan mountains.
Turkmenistan is building Golden Age Lake in the Karashor Depression, meant to cover 2,000 square kilometres, reach 70 metres deep and take perhaps 15 years and $4.5 billion to fill. Drainage from cotton fields would arrive through collectors such as the 432-kilometre Dashoguz line, partly following the old Uzboy bed. Wildlife is modest: darkling and dung beetles, termites, lizards, tortoises, larks, jerboas, corsac foxes, tolai hares and goitered gazelles.
Source: Karakum Desert
