IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Southern Tibet : vol.7 |
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Citation Information
BASINS OF THE TIBETAN PLATEAU-LAND
497
I have entered in the list only these two and Dagtse-tso as other lakes belonging to the same group, as e. g. Lakor-tso , Tongka - tso and Tashi-bhup-tso, are too little known so far as their drainage areas are concerned. All three of these basins are large, the third of them, Selling-tso, being the largest in all Tibet, with an area
of 3 2,77 5 sq. km.
Finally we come to the southernmost chain of lakes within the self-contained area of Tibet. In the table I have entered fourteen of them, of which seven were discovered by NAIN SING, six by me and one, Tengri-nor, has been known for 2 00 years. Except one, the Shuru-tso, they are all situated along the northern base of Transhimalaya in the same way as the Kwen-lun lakes are situated along the southern base of the Kwen-lun. As nearly every one of the latter are situated in the southern part of their respective drainage basins, so the Transhimalayan lakes are, as a rule, placed near the northern edge of their respective basins. One of these lakes, the Tengri-nor, being 1900 sq. km. in size, is the largest of all lakes in Tibet; the Selling-tso with 1825 sq. km. being the second. Several of the drainage basins are comparatively large, those of the Tengri-nor and Kyaring-tso having an area of resp. I I , I oo and 12,400 sq. km., and those of the Tarok-tso, Teri-nam-tso, and Dangra-yum-tso, being from 8500 to I o,000 sq. km. in size. Nearly all these lakes, perhaps with the exception of Marchar-tso, Shuru-tso and Chunit-tso, are fed by more or less considerable rivers from the great water-parting I of the Transhimalaya, a fact which in no small degree is due to the comparatively abundant precipitation of the south-west monsoon caught by the Transhimalayan ranges. Still, in this connection it should not be forgotten that the largest river of the self-contained Tibetan plateau-land does not take its origin from the Transhimalaya , but from the southern side of the Tang-la, viz., the Sachu-tsangpo, the drainage area of which is also the largest of Tibet, or nearly 33,o00 sq. km.
The area of the self-contained plateau-land of Tibet, 1. e. the region that has no outflow to the ocean, to the Tarim Basin or Tsaidam, is, according to my calculation from Colonel H. BYSTRÖM'S map in I :1,000,000, in all 717,800 sq. km., which is not quite as large as the Scandinavian peninsula (Sweden and Norway together 772,140 sq. km.).
The whole area of the basins entered in the list given on p. 493, amounts to 276,050 sq. km., or more than one third of the whole area. To give a list of all the basins of which the whole Tibetan plateau-land consists and which form a complicated mosaic work or » puzzle », is of course impossible with our present knowledge of the country. In my list I have only entered such basins as may
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I By the great water-parting of the Transhimalaya I mean the line on the northern side of which the water flows to Tibet, whereas to the south it goes to India. To call it »the continental water-parting» is not quite correct. On the northern side of the eastern section of Transhimalaya the water has an oceanic outflow. Here, however, we are only concerned with the Central Transhimalaya.
63. VII,
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