This Lake Is Fresh on One Side and Salty on the Other

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Издатель Nov 9, 2026

Lake Balkhash in Kazakhstan is one lake with two kinds of water. Its western half is almost fresh, its eastern half is salty, and there is no wall between them. The reason is a single river, the Ili, a narrow strait in the middle of the lake, and a desert sun that takes the water and leaves the salt behind.

But the Ili starts in China, the Soviet Union nearly drained the lake with a dam in 1970, and scientists once warned it could become a second Aral Sea. Today the fresh half is wanted by rice farms, by Kazakhstan's first nuclear power plant, and by tigers returning to the Ili delta. This is the story of Balkhash: why it is fresh and salty at once, how close it came to dying, and who gets its water next.

Chapters
0:00 One lake, two waters
0:50 A lake in the desert
1:46 The secret of the strait
2:59 The Soviet thirst
4:10 The river from China
5:11 Why it is still here
5:45 Three plans for the fresh half
6:57 Who gets the water?

Sources and further reading
- Britannica, Lake Balkhash: https://www.britannica.com/place/Lake-Balkhash
- Britannica, Ili River: https://www.britannica.com/place/Ili-River
- Britannica, Balqash (town): https://www.britannica.com/place/Balqash
- NASA Earth Observatory, Lake Balkhash images: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov
- Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery: https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu
- USGS Landsat archive: https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov
- NOAA, Why is the ocean salty?: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/whysalty.html
- Stone (2012), For China and Kazakhstan, no meeting of the minds on water, Science: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.337.6093.405
- Farinotti et al. (2015), Substantial glacier mass loss in the Tien Shan, Nature Geoscience: https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2513
- Agreement between Kazakhstan and China on transboundary rivers (12 September 2001), CAWater-Info
- Reuters, Kazakhstan nuclear power plant referendum (6 October 2024) [add link]
- World Nuclear News, Kazakhstan's first nuclear plant at Ulken [add link]
- WWF, Tiger reintroduction in Kazakhstan [add link]

Every figure in this video is sourced. Spotted a mistake? Tell us in the pinned comment.

Credits: satellite images, photos and footage as credited on screen. Some landscape and map shots are AI-generated reconstructions. Narration voice: Kokoro TTS (Apache 2.0).

#Kazakhstan #LakeBalkhash #Geography #Water #CentralAsia #SteppeAtlas