Lop Desert

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The Lop Desert, or the Lop Depression, is a desert extending from Korla eastwards along the foot of the Kuruk-tagh (meaning Dry Mountain) to the former terminal Tarim Basin in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. It is an almost perfectly flat expanse with no topographic relief. Lake Bosten in the northwest lies at an altitude of 1,030 to 1,040 m (3,380 to 3,410 ft), while the Lop Nur in the southeast is only 250 m lower. The desert lies within a sediment basin that was separated from the Taklamakan basin in the Pliocene and lowered towards the east by a tectonic dip-slip fault. The rivers Tarim and Konqi used to flow in the rift valley between both basins towards the south until they dried up around 1971 at Tikanlik. The road 218 from Korla to Qakilik follows the river beds. The desert is bounded in the west by this road, in the north by the Kuruk Tagh mountain range, in the east by the Bei Shan range (between Barkol Tagh and Bogda Shan), in the southeast by the Kumtag Desert and in the south by the Aqikkol valley.