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Chinanews, Beijing, June 22 – Since the mid1 19th century, many scientists have gone on expeditions to Lop Nor Lake, including the Italian, Marco Polo, the Swedish Sven Anders Hedin, and Chinese Peng Jiamu. In order to unveil the mysteries of the Lop Nor Lake, which is dubbed2 the “dead sea”, the People’s Daily reported.
In Mid June, a group of Chinese scientists published the result of their studies about the environmental and geological changes of the Lop Nor Lake in Beijing. Their studies have passed experts’ appraisal3. The group headed by Xia Xuncheng, a renowned4 Chinese expert, consists of many academicians such as Sun Honglie, Liu Dongsheng, Sun Shu, and Ye Danian. Their findings will play a significant role in boosting the studies of the Lop Nor Lake. In the last century, the Swedish adventurer Sven Hedin once concluded that Lop Nor was a moving lake. It moved from north to south and from south to north. A complete cycle for such movement lasted for 1,500 years. With the latest expeditions, however, Xia Xuncheng and his team found that the lake was not moving. Although much of the bed in the lake was eroded5 by wind, the location of the water in the lake had not changed much over years. The scientists found that the water in the lake had changed as its water system nearby had. Now the lake has dried up. The bed of the lake is very much like the shape of a human ear when seen from the pictures taken by satellites in space. Due to this reason, Lop Nor Lake has a nickname “big ear”. How did the lake take the shape as it is seen today? The question has also aroused heated discussions among scientists. When Xia and his team placed the shape of the “big ear” onto a hypsographic map, they found that its shape coincided with the 780-meter contour line for the lake. On this contour line, the area of the lake reached 5,350 square kilometers. With this finding, Xia and his team concluded that the shape of Lop Nor Lake was formed when it shrunk substantially during the 1960s. The shrinking process lasted for 4-5 years. In 1901, Sven Hedin discovered the Lou;an Ancient Town with the help of a local guide. This was regarded as a great discovery of the time. To Xia and his team, the fall of the Loulan Ancient Town was attributable to basically two factors: lack of water and the town’s diminishing role in transportation. Way back in the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC – AD 25), Loulan had been a very important transportation hub, when food and water were delivered via the city. The Han emperors even stationed troops there to guard the fontier and farmers reclaimed6 wasteland for crop cultivation7. All this made Loulan Ancient Town become very prosperous. The ancient town once served as an important gateway8 along the ancient Silk Road. However, in later years, people traveled to the Western Regions (present Xinjiang and parts of Central Asia) via the southern slope of the Tianshan Mountains. Over time, the ancient town had ceased to be no longer an important transportation hub. Another reason that contributed to the fall of the Loulan Ancient Town was that the town was built on the lower reaches of a river called the Peacock River. As the river changed greatly from one year to another, this greatly affected9 the lives of people living nearby. In the end, many people moved out of the region to resettle in other places, so it has since become an off-the-map place
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