Iran’s great salt lake shrank to a tenth of its former self
Lake Urmia in Iranian Azerbaijan was once West Asia’s largest lake and the world’s sixth-largest saltwater body. By late 2017 drought, river dams, and groundwater pumping had cut it to about ten percent of its old area and one-sixtieth of its 1998 volume.
Roughly 102 former islands sit inside a national park run by Iran’s Department of Environment. Beyond the national park, the lake is also listed as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and a Ramsar wetland. Its brine carries sodium and chloride at roughly four times seawater strength, along with potassium, calcium, lithium and magnesium. Since 2008 a causeway and the Urmia Lake Bridge have split it into northern and southern halves, leaving only a 1.5-kilometre opening for water to pass. Rains in 2019 finally began refilling the pan after the dry spell.
As inflows dwindled, salinity climbed, making the lake harder for thousands of migrating birds such as flamingos to use. Surveys in 2014 and 2016 still counted 311 plant species, 226 birds, 27 amphibians and reptiles and 62 kinds of bacteria and archaea.
Etymologies range from Urartian roots to Indo-Iranian “wave,” Neo-Aramaic, and Old Persian Chichast—“glittering”—for mineral sparkle along the shore. Richard Nelson Frye favoured an Urartian root, and T. Burrow linked the name to the Indo-Iranian word urmi-, a wave. Persian speakers call it Daryâče-ye Orumiye and Azerbaijanis Urmu gölü. Armenians still say Kaputan tsov, “blue sea.”
Prehistoric mounds such as Yanik Tepe show settlement back to about 6000 BCE; Dalma, Hasanlu, and Geoy Tepe cluster south of the lake. The Se Girdan burial mounds on the south shore, dug in 1968 and 1970 by O. Muscarella, were once thought far younger but now date to the late fourth millennium BCE. Assyrian records under Shalmaneser III (858–824 BCE) already named nearby Parsuwaš and Matai. In the last five centuries Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Persians, Assyrians, and Armenians have shared the basin.
Source: Lake Urmia
