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| Qinghai Kokonor Lake to Stop 'Shrinking' |
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The country's largest inland lake, Qinghai Kokonor, will stop "shrinking" and start reverting to its former level within a decade, scientists from the
"The water level in the lake will stabilize by about 2016 and then it will start to rise," Li Shijie, a researcher from the Nanjing Institute of Geography & Limnology of It is expected to reach However, between 1970 and 2000, its water level fell by about In order to prevent it falling further, the local authority has banned farming and fishing in and around the lake and also stopped people from living beside it. Li said he and his colleagues had spent three years studying the lake. Forecasting rainfall is very complex and involves the soil, climate and the terrain, Li said. However, he did manage to set up a water level model based on data from 1960 to 2000, and the results were "rather accurate" he said. "This is all due to global warming, which causes stronger "The change in rainfall over the years provides a reflection of the different stages of global warming," he said. In recent decades, there has been an increase in temperature and evaporation, which finally lead to the water level falling, he said. "In the second stage, the heat creates more rainfall which counters the evaporation," Li said. He also said current research was still quite "rough" due to a lack of data. "But this trend is only about time. Sooner or later, the water level will increase," Li said. Chinese scientists made the same forecast several years ago in the book Assessment and Forecast of Western China's Environment Change. Statistics from the climate date center in "With more rainfall, the ( |
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