A lake at the lower reaches of the Tarim River, China's longest inland river, has been forced to move 30 kilometers to 40 km westward over the past 40 years by a sprawling desert on its northeast.

A satellite picture taken in August 2002 showed the center of Taitema Lake, where the Tarim River empties, has shifted to the western side of a trunk highway in the region, said Yuan Guoying, a research fellow with the Environmental Protection Institute of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

On the 1965 edition of the regional map, however, the lake had been about 20 km east of the place where the highway was later built, Yuan said Tuesday in an interview with Xinhua.

Taitema Lake is located in Ruoqiang county of the Mongolian Autonomous Prefecture of Bayingolin, in the central eastern part of Xinjiang. The 1,321-km-long Tarim River, known as the mother river for people in southern Xinjiang, flows into Taitema Lake.

Yuan said he first proposed the hypothesis about the lake's moving westward in August 2003, when he accompanied a group of Chinese and German experts on a field survey on the ecosystem at the lower reaches of the Tarim River, which sandwiched between the Taklimakan and Kuruktag deserts.

Yuan visited the lake again this summer to prove his hypothesis. "Even in the rainy season, water from the swelling Tarim River refused to flow eastward to where the lake had been in the past," he said.

This is because most plants have died out in the harsh environment and the former site of the lake has been elevated with sand from the sprawling Kuruktag Desert on its northeast, Yuan said.

The Taitema Lake dried up in 1972 because of excessive use of water for irrigation. Chinese tamarisk and polar forests reduced in the wake of worsening environment.

China diverted water from Kongque He, or Peacock River, on the north to the lower reaches of the Tarim River five times between April 2000 and November 2003. Today, Taitema Lake has expanded to about 200 sq km.

Source: Xinhua