Chaerhan Salt Lake

Chaerhan Salt Lake

Qarhan Salt Lake is a salt lake in the west of Qinghai Province in China. It is as famous as Chaka Salt Lake. It is located in the south of Qaidam Basin and crosses Golmud City and Dulan county. It is composed of Dabson lake and salt ponds such as South Hobson, North Hobson and senei. It covers a total area of 5856 square kilometers. Several inland rivers such as Golmud River and Qaidam river flow into the lake. Due to the continuous evaporation of water, the salt lake forms a hard salt cover, and the Qinghai Tibet railway and Qinghai Tibet highway are directly built on the salt cover. Qarhan Salt Lake is rich in sodium chloride, potassium chloride, magnesium chloride and other inorganic salts, with a total reserve of more than 2 billion tons. It is one of China's mining bases. There is the famous wanzhang salt bridge.

Development history

There is a legend in Qarhan that goes like this: a long time ago, there was gold, silver and jewelry everywhere in Qarhan, but the mountain gods and demons were not responsible and indifferent, and they fought all the year round to seize the treasure, which brought great disaster here. Xiwang's mother, who lives in the depths of Kunlun Mountain, said, "it's too shameful." she decided to settle these things. She ordered the water god to put down Tianshui and submerge these treasures, so that no one can get them, leaving only the descendants of the world. So, there is such a salt lake. In fact, the Qarhan Salt Lake was formed when the ancient ocean was separated by mountains and gradually shrunk and dried up through the crustal changes of the Qinghai Tibet Plateau.

Tourism information

The wonder of salt flower

All the green plants in Chaerhan Salt Lake are difficult to grow, but they breed the magic salt flower which is crystal clear and changeable. Salt flower is a kind of crystal with beautiful shape formed when salt crystallizes in salt lake. In the process of brine crystallization, due to different concentration, different time, different composition and other reasons, salt flowers with different shapes and uncanny workmanship are formed. The salt flowers here are like pearls, corals, pavilions, birds and animals. They stand in clusters in the salt lake, and decorate the salt lake as beautiful as a fairyland. Every year, tens of thousands of domestic and foreign tourists come to see the wonder of salt flower.

Wanzhang salt bridge

If you drive on national highway 215, you will find that there is a straight road near Golmud City, floating like a bridge on the Qarhan Salt Lake. If you don't face the four characters of "wanzhang salt bridge", you will think it is an ordinary highway, but in fact, it is a 32 km long salt bridge, which is known as "wanzhang salt bridge" because it is equivalent to the city system.

Wanzhang salt bridge is a section of road from Golmud to Dunhuang, which passes through the Dabson lake. The 15-18 meters thick salt cover forms a natural salt bridge, with a total length of 32 kilometers, which can reach wanzhang in the city system. Therefore, people call it "wanzhang salt bridge". "Bridge" smooth road surface, mountains and lakes, beautiful scenery, can be called "unparalleled". Jade belt like salt bridge (Road), no guardrail, no pier, no water. The whole road is smooth, smooth and straight. The salt bridge (Road) splits the salt lake in two from the middle, which makes people marvel. They have to submit to the intelligence and wisdom of human beings.

geographical position

Qarhan Salt Lake is located in Golmud City, Qinghai Province. It is the largest salt lake in China and one of the most famous inland salt lakes in the world. It is as famous as Chaka Salt Lake. The Qinghai Tibet railway passes through it. The salt lake is more than 160 kilometers long from east to west, 20-40 kilometers wide from north to south, 2-20 meters thick, with an area of 5800 square kilometers and an altitude of 2670 meters. More than 50 billion tons of sodium chloride are stored in the lake, which can be consumed by 6 billion people in the world for 1000 years. Also produce world-famous carnallite, it is crystal clear, very lovely. Associated with magnesium, lithium, boron, iodine and other minerals, potassium, salt resources are extremely rich.

"Qarhan" is Mongolian, which means "Yanze". Salt lake is located in the Gobi sea, where the climate is hot and dry, sunshine time is long, water evaporation is much higher than precipitation. Due to long-term exposure to the sun and wind, the lake formed a high concentration of brine, gradually crystallized into salt particles, and the lake surface formed a thick salt cover, which was extremely hard. It is incredible that there is a 32 km long highway and railway passing through the salt lake, which is a "wanzhang salt bridge" floating on the brine. The highway and railway are a section of Golmud Dunhuang highway and a section of Qinghai Tibet railway.

The Qaidam Basin, situated between the towering Kunlun Mountains and the Qilian Mountains, is well-known at home and abroad for its "treasure bowl" on the Qinghai Tibet Plateau. The heart of the Qaidam Basin is the famous Qarhan. Qarhan Salt Lake is one of the largest natural salt lakes in the world. It has been famous for more than half a century because of its amazing salt resources and 32 kilometers of strange scenery of "wanzhang salt bridge".

Geographical features

Erhan Mongolian means "place with dense rivers". The lowest elevation of Chaerhan Salt Lake is more than 2200 meters, which is composed of four salt lakes, namely Dabson, South Hobson, North Hobson and senei. More than 10 inland rivers, such as Geermu River and sulenguole River, have been injected. "Qarhan" is Mongolian, which means "Yanze". Around the salt lake, the terrain is flat and the desert is boundless, but the scenery is peculiar. The whole lake is like a piece of fertile soil that has just been cultivated, and like fish scales, layer by layer, wave by wave. Unfortunately, there is no grass on the land, no fish in the lake, no birds in the sky, and there is silence.

This kind of salt cover has great bearing capacity. Cars and trains can run on it, airplanes can take off and land on it, and even houses and factories can be built on it. The famous Qinghai Tibet railway, the tungge highway and the Chaerhan potash fertilizer plant, the largest potash fertilizer plant in China, are all built on the Chaerhan Salt Lake. The Qinghai Tibet highway and the Qinghai Tibet railway pass through the salt lake, and the subgrade is made of salt, with a length of 32 kilometers. They are called wanzhang salt bridge and steel rainbow respectively.

formation

Qarhan Salt Lake is the lowest lying and core area in Qaidam Basin. Hundreds of millions of years ago, Qaidam was once a vast ocean. Due to the uplift of the Qinghai Tibet Plateau, the sea and land changed, and Qaidam became a basin. There are more than 100 lakes in Qaidam, of which Qarhan Salt Lake is the largest and most famous. In Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica, there was a record of Chaerhan, which was rich in products, and the "green salt" used at that time originated from this place.

Salt resources

Qarhan Salt Lake is a large inland comprehensive Salt Lake, which is mainly composed of potash, accompanied by magnesium, sodium, lithium, boron, iodine and other minerals. In the Qarhan Salt Lake, we can see a kind of peculiar landform - salt karst landform. As we usually say, salt bell milk and salt flower are the embodiment of this kind of landform. It is rich in potassium and magnesium salt resources, with a reserve of 50 billion tons. It is the main producing area of potassium and magnesium salt in China. Chaerhan Salt Lake is the largest potash and magnesium deposit in China, with a total salt reserve of more than 60 billion tons and an annual potash fertilizer output of more than 4 million tons. Qinghai Salt Lake Potash Co., Ltd. (the former Qinghai potash fertilizer plant), the largest potash fertilizer enterprise in China, has been built on the lake, with an output of more than 4 million tons in 2014.

From west to East, the salt lake is divided into four lake areas, namely Bieletan, Dabson, Chaerhan and Hobson, with a total area of 5856 square kilometers. Chaerhan is the largest salt lake in China and the second largest in the world (after the Salt Lake City of the United States), with a total salt reserves of more than 60 billion tons. Someone made such a conversion: if a salt bridge with a thickness of 6 meters and a width of 12 meters is built, the salt here can reach the moon from the earth. According to Qinghai salt industry experts, the potential development value of Chaerhan Salt Lake is at least 12 trillion yuan. This is the largest potash production base in China. There are dozens of minerals such as magnesium, lithium, sodium, iodine and so on in the salt lake brine. Among them, the reserves of potassium chloride alone reach 145 million tons, accounting for 97% of the whole country; the reserves of magnesium chloride are nearly 1.7 billion tons, and the reserves of lithium chloride are 8.25 million tons They all rank first in China.

Development and utilization

Resource discovery

The geological discovery of beneficial resources in Qarhan Salt Lake was made in the 1950s. After the founding of new China, China established various industrial bases in the northwest, vigorously developed mining production, and Qinghai also launched some projects. A large number of geologists were sent to various places to search for ore sources. Among them, a group of scientific researchers and geologists came to the Qinghai Tibet Plateau, went deep into the Qaidam Basin, and came to the ancient salt lake. They carefully sampled and tested from there to see what minerals there were. After several years of efforts, geologists and experts have finally concluded that there are abundant mineral resources in the vast ancient salt lakes in the Qarhan area, especially the huge reserves of potassium.

Start chemical fertilizer plant

In 1958, the state officially decided to set up a potash fertilizer production base in Qinghai to change the difficult situation of no potash fertilizer in China. Like all other kinds of projects in northwest industrial base, the construction of potash fertilizer plant in Qinghai is a battle. In response to the party's call to support the construction and development of potash fertilizer industry in Northwest China, more than 5000 hot-blooded youths came to the Qinghai Tibet Plateau from the northeast of China with backpacks, and to the mysterious Qaidam and Qarhan. They set up tents on the desolate plateau and beside salt lakes, and started the first battle of potash fertilizer production and construction: building factories. At that time, relying on hard work, they successfully built a potash fertilizer plant and put it into production, producing 1000 tons of domestic potash fertilizer, which filled the blank of no potash fertilizer production in China and laid a foundation for the development and gradual growth of China's potash fertilizer industry in the future. In the 20 years after that, Qinghai potash fertilizer plant produced a large number of potash fertilizer for the country, saving a lot of foreign exchange

Chinese PinYin : Cha Er Han Yan Hu