The Kaydak Inlet or Sor Kaydak (russian: Залив Кайдак) is a narrow
inlet
An inlet is a (usually long and narrow) indentation of a shoreline, such as a small arm, bay, sound, fjord, lagoon or marsh, that leads to an enclosed larger body of water such as a lake, estuary, gulf or marginal sea.
Overview
In marine geogra ...
or arm at the eastern end of the
Dead Kultuk (former Komsomolets), a
bay
A bay is a recessed, coastal body of water that directly connects to a larger main body of water, such as an ocean, a lake, or another bay. A large bay is usually called a Gulf (geography), gulf, sea, sound (geography), sound, or bight (geogra ...
of the
Caspian Sea in the coast of
Kazakhstan. Located at the mainland end of the bay, it forms the eastern limit of the
Buzachi Peninsula, at the north of the
Mangyshlak Peninsula. The inlet was shallow and cut deep into the coast extending east and then roughly southwards in a SSW direction. Like all shallow gulfs of the eastern shores of the Caspian, it had a high salinity.
In the same manner as the Dead Kultuk, the Kaydak Inlet had a distinct coastline in former times, but in the 1990s and 2000s, with higher Caspian Sea levels, the water penetrated inland through the neck of the bay producing waterlogged marshes. At times of higher water level both the bay and the inlet were filled with Caspian Sea water.
[Igor S. Zonn, Aleksey N Kosarev, Michael H. Glantz & Andrey G. Kostianoy, ''The Caspian Sea Encyclopedia'', p. 156] The water in the shallow inlet had striking colours, in which delicate tones of blue or of brown predominated according to the seasons.
With shrinking Caspian Sea level in the 2020s as a result of global warming and increased evaporation, the Kaydak Inlet became dry.
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Cartography
The area was mapped by Fedor Ivanovich Soimonov
Fedor Ivanovich Soimonov (russian: Фёдор Иванович Соймо́нов; 1692 – 22 July 1780), Knight of the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky, was a nautical surveyor of the Imperial Russian Navy, hydrographer and pioneering explorer ...
during the Caspian Expedition, which surveyed the Caspian Sea from 1719 to 1727, but was only accurately described later by G. S. Karelin in 1832.[
]
See also
* Dead Kultuk
* Sor (geomorphology)
References
External links
Caspian Sea Biodiversity''Overview of oil and natural gas in the Caspian Sea region'' Last Updated: August 26, 2013
Bodies of water of Kazakhstan
Bays of the Caspian Sea
Inlets of Europe
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