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Balkhash, Lake
Lake Balkhash, also spelt Lake Balqash (, , ), is a lake in southeastern Kazakhstan, one of the largest lakes in Asia and the 15th largest in the world. It is located in the eastern part of Central Asia and sits in the Balkhash-Alakol Basin, an endorheic (closed) basin. The basin drains seven rivers, the primary of which is the Ili, bringing most of the riparian inflow; others, such as the Karatal, bring surface and subsurface flow. The Ili is fed by precipitation, largely vernal snowmelt, from the mountains of China's Xinjiang region. The lake currently covers about . However, like the Aral Sea, it is shrinking due to diversion and extraction of water from its feeders. The lake has a narrow, quite central, strait. The lake's western part is fresh water and its eastern half is saline. The eastern part is on average 1.7 times deeper than the west. The largest shore city is named Balkhash and has about 66,000 inhabitants. Main local economic activities include mining, ore proce ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a landlocked country primarily in Central Asia, with a European Kazakhstan, small portion in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the Kazakhstan–Russia border, north and west, China to the China–Kazakhstan border, east, Kyrgyzstan to the Kazakhstan–Kyrgyzstan border, southeast, Uzbekistan to the Kazakhstan–Uzbekistan border, south, and Turkmenistan to the Kazakhstan–Turkmenistan border, southwest, with a coastline along the Caspian Sea. Its capital is Astana, while the largest city and leading cultural and commercial hub is Almaty. Kazakhstan is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, ninth-largest country by land area and the largest landlocked country. Steppe, Hilly plateaus and plains account for nearly half its vast territory, with Upland and lowland, lowlands composing another third; its southern and eastern frontiers are composed of low mountainous regions. Kazakhstan has a population of 20 mi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Precipitation (meteorology)
In meteorology, precipitation is any product of the condensation of atmospheric water vapor that falls from clouds due to gravitational pull. The main forms of precipitation include drizzle, rain, rain and snow mixed ("sleet" in Commonwealth usage), snow, ice pellets, graupel and hail. Precipitation occurs when a portion of the atmosphere becomes saturated with water vapor (reaching 100% relative humidity), so that the water condenses and "precipitates" or falls. Thus, fog and mist are not precipitation; their water vapor does not condense sufficiently to precipitate, so fog and mist do not fall. (Such a non-precipitating combination is a colloid.) Two processes, possibly acting together, can lead to air becoming saturated with water vapor: cooling the air or adding water vapor to the air. Precipitation forms as smaller droplets coalesce via collision with other rain drops or ice crystals within a cloud. Short, intense periods of rain in scattered locations are called shower (p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Max Vasmer
Max Julius Friedrich Vasmer (; ; 28 February 1886 – 30 November 1962) was a Russian and German linguist. He studied problems of etymology in Indo-European, Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages and worked on the history of Slavic, Baltic, Iranian, and Finno-Ugric peoples. Biography Max Vasmer was born on 28 February 1886 to German parents in Saint Petersburg. Vasmer graduated from Saint Petersburg University in 1907 as a student of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Aleksey Shakhmatov. From 1907 to 1908, he studied Greek dialects and the Albanian language in Greece. He continued to study at the universities of Krakow and Vienna from 1908 to 1910. From 1910, he delivered lectures and taught at the Bestuzhev Courses in 1912. During the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922, he worked in the universities of Saratov (1917–1918) and Dorpat (1918–1921). From 1921 to 1925, he taught at the University of Leipzig, and from 1925 to 1945, he taught at the University of Berlin. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tussock Grass
Tussock grasses or bunch grasses are a group of grass species in the family Poaceae. They usually grow as singular plants in clumps, tufts, hummocks, or bunches, rather than forming a sod or lawn, in meadows, grasslands, and prairies. As perennial plants, most species live more than one season. Tussock grasses are often found as forage in pastures and ornamental grasses in gardens. Many species have long roots that may reach or more into the soil, which can aid slope stabilization, erosion control, and soil porosity for precipitation absorption. Also, their roots can reach moisture more deeply than other grasses and annual plants during seasonal or climatic droughts. The plants provide habitat and food for insects (including Lepidoptera), birds, small animals and larger herbivores, and support beneficial soil mycorrhiza. The leaves supply material, such as for basket weaving, for indigenous peoples and contemporary artists. Tussock and bunch grasses occur in almost any habit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Southern Altai Language
Southern Altai (also known as Oirot, Oyrot, Altai and Altai proper) is a Turkic language spoken in the Altai Republic, a federal subject of Russia located in Southern Siberia on the border with Mongolia and China. The language has some mutual intelligibility with the Northern Altai language, leading to the two being traditionally considered as a single language. According to modern classifications—at least since the middle of the 20th century—they are considered to be two separate languages. Written Altai is based on Southern Altai. According to some reports, however, it is rejected by Northern Altai children. Dialects include Altai Proper and Talangit. Classification Southern Altai is a member of the Turkic language family. Within this family, there have been various attempts to classify Altai, and not all of them agree as to its position as it has a number of ambiguous characteristics. Due to certain similarities with Kyrgyz, some scholars group Altai with the Kyrgy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kazakh Language
Kazakh is a Turkic language of the Kipchak branch spoken in Central Asia by Kazakhs. It is closely related to Nogai, Kyrgyz and Karakalpak. It is the official language of Kazakhstan, and has official status in the Altai Republic of Russia. It is also a significant minority language in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang, China, and in the Bayan-Ölgii Province of western Mongolia. The language is also spoken by many ethnic Kazakhs throughout the former Soviet Union (some 472,000 in Russia according to the 2010 Russian census), Germany, and Turkey. Like other Turkic languages, Kazakh is an agglutinative language and employs vowel harmony. Kazakh builds words by adding suffixes one after another to the word stem, with each suffix expressing only one unique meaning and following a fixed sequence. ''Ethnologue'' recognizes three mutually intelligible dialect groups: Northeastern Kazakh—the most widely spoken variety, which also serves as the basis for the o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tatar Language
Tatar ( ; or ) is a Turkic languages, Turkic language spoken by the Volga Tatars mainly located in modern Tatarstan (European Russia), as well as Siberia. It should not be confused with Crimean Tatar language, Crimean Tatar or Siberian Tatar language, Siberian Tatar, which are closely related but belong to different subgroups of the Kipchak languages. Geographic distribution The Tatar language is spoken in Russia by about 5.3 million people, and also by communities in Azerbaijan, China, Finland, Georgia (country), Georgia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Turkey, Ukraine, the United States, Uzbekistan, and several other countries. Globally, there are more than 7 million speakers of Tatar. Tatar is also the mother tongue for several thousand Mari people, Mari, a Finnic peoples, Finnic people; Mordva's Qaratay group also speak a variant of Kazan Tatar. In the Russian Census (2010), 2010 census, 69% of Russian Tatars claimed at least some knowledge of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microclimate
A microclimate (or micro-climate) is a local set of atmosphere of Earth, atmospheric conditions that differ from those in the surrounding areas, often slightly but sometimes substantially. The term may refer to areas as small as a few square meters or smaller (for example a raised-bed gardening, garden bed, underneath a rock, or a cave) or as large as many square kilometers. Because climate is statistics, statistical, which implies Spatial analysis, spatial and temporal variation of the mean values of the describing parameters, microclimates are identified as statistically distinct conditions which occur and/or persist within a region. Microclimates can be found in most places but are most pronounced in topographically dynamic zones such as mountainous areas, islands, and coastal areas. Microclimates exist, for example, near bodies of water which may cool the local atmosphere, or in heavy urban areas where brick, concrete, and Asphalt concrete, asphalt absorb the sun's energy, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Desertification
Desertification is a type of gradual land degradation of Soil fertility, fertile land into arid desert due to a combination of natural processes and human activities. The immediate cause of desertification is the loss of most vegetation. This is driven by a number of factors, alone or in combination, such as drought, climatic shifts, tillage for agriculture, overgrazing and deforestation for fuel or construction materials. Though vegetation plays a major role in determining the Soil biology, biological composition of the soil, studies have shown that, in many environments, the rate of erosion and runoff decreases exponentially with increased vegetation cover. Unprotected, dry soil surfaces blow away with the wind or are washed away by flash floods, leaving infertile lower soil layers that bake in the sun and become an unproductive hardpan. At least 90% of the inhabitants of drylands live in Developing country, developing countries, where they also suffer from poor economic and s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Balkhash (city)
Balkhash ( rus, Балхаш, p=bɐɫˈxaʂ) or Balqash (, ; ) is a city in Kazakhstan, located on the northern shore of Lake Balkhash, on the Bay Bertys, and in the south of the Kazakh Uplands. The population of the city is Balkhash was founded in 1937 as an industrial city centred on the mining and smelting of copper, which is still being exploited in the area. The city lies approximately 500 km west of the Chinese border, on the north side of the lake at an altitude of 440 m. History On 11 April 1937, a small workers' settlement "Pribalhashstroy", designed in connection with the construction of a copper factory - BGMC, was transformed into the city of Balkhash by decision of the Central Executive Committee of the Kazakh SSR. In this way, the copper factory affected the city's appearance. On 9 November 1932, the first school was established in the city - school No. 1. The school educated a few children of the builders of the city that time. Among these children wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Saline Water
Saline water (more commonly known as salt water) is water that contains a high concentration of dissolved salts (mainly sodium chloride). On the United States Geological Survey (USGS) salinity scale, saline water is saltier than brackish water, but less salty than brine. The salt concentration is usually expressed in parts per thousand (permille, ‰) and parts per million (ppm). The USGS salinity scale defines three levels of saline water. The salt concentration in slightly saline water is 1,000 to 3,000 ppm (0.1–0.3%); in moderately saline water is 3,000 to 10,000 ppm (0.3–1%); and in highly saline water is 10,000 to 35,000 ppm (1–3.5%). Seawater has a salinity of roughly 35,000 ppm, equivalent to 35 grams of salt per one liter (or kilogram) of water. The saturation level is only nominally dependent on the temperature of the water. At one liter of water can dissolve about 357 grams of salt, a concentration of 26.3 percent by weight (% w/w). At (the boiling temper ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fresh Water
Fresh water or freshwater is any naturally occurring liquid or frozen water containing low concentrations of dissolved salt (chemistry), salts and other total dissolved solids. The term excludes seawater and brackish water, but it does include non-salty mineral water, mineral-rich waters, such as chalybeate springs. Fresh water may encompass frozen water, frozen and meltwater in ice sheets, ice caps, glaciers, snowfields and icebergs, natural precipitations such as rainfall, snowfall, hail/ice pellets, sleet and graupel, and surface runoffs that form inland bodies of water such as wetlands, ponds, lakes, rivers, streams, as well as groundwater contained in aquifers, subterranea (geography), subterranean subterranean river, rivers and underground lake, lakes. Water is critical to the survival of all living organisms. Many organisms can thrive on salt water, but the great majority of vascular plants and most insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds need fresh water to sur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
