Qaidam Basin
geographic region
The Qaidam, Tsaidam, or Chaidamu Basin is a hyperarid basin that occupies a large part of Haixi Prefecture in Qinghai Province, China. The basin covers an area of approximately 120,000 km2 (46,000 sq mi), one-fourth of which is covered by saline lakes and playas. Around one third of the basin, about 35,000 km2 (14,000 sq mi), is desert.
Name
Tshwa'i 'Dam is the Wylie romanization of the Tibetan name ཚྭའི་འདམ་, meaning "Salt Marsh"; the Tibetan Pinyin romanization of the same name is Caidam. Qaidam is the GNC romanization of its transcription into Mongolian; Tsaidam is a variant romanization of the same name. Chaidamu is the pinyin romanization of its transcription into Chinese characters; the same name was formerly romanized as the Zaidam Swamp for the Chinese Postal Map.
Geography
Orographically, the Qaidam Basin is a comparatively low area in the northeastern part of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. With an elevation of around 3,000 m (10,000 ft), Qaidam forms a kind of shelf between Tibet to the south (around 4,300 m or 14,000 ft) and Gansu to the north (around 1,100 m or 3,500 ft). A low water divide separates the Qaidam Basin proper from that of Qinghai Lake to the east. Despite this lower elevation, Qaidam is still high enough that its mean annual temperature is 2–4 °C (36–39 °F) despite lying on the same latitude as Algeria, Greece, and Virginia in the United States.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Qaidam Basin” is geographic region. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Qaidam, Basin and geographic, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Qaidam Basin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.