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Takir (soil)
Takir (takyr) (originally from Kazakh or another Turkic language) meaning "smooth, even, or bare", is a type of relief occurring in the deserts of Central Asia, similar to a salt flat in the southwestern United States. A takyr is usually formed in a shallow depressed area with a heavy clay soil, which is submerged by water after seasonal rains. After the water evaporates, a dried crust with fissures forms on the surface. The crust is often colonized by filamentous cyanobacteria Cyanobacterial morphology refers to the form or shape of cyanobacteria. Cyanobacteria are a large and diverse phylum of bacteria defined by their unique combination of pigments and their ability to perform oxygenic photosynthesis. Cyanobacteria .... In the southwestern U.S. "takyrs" are known as "playas" or "salt flats", in Arab countries as "sabkha". See also * Daryalyktakyr References * Jayne Belnap, Otto Ludwig Lange. "Biological Soil Crusts: Structure, Function, and Management". Springer, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Drought
A drought is a period of drier-than-normal conditions.Douville, H., K. Raghavan, J. Renwick, R.P. Allan, P.A. Arias, M. Barlow, R. Cerezo-Mota, A. Cherchi, T.Y. Gan, J. Gergis, D. Jiang, A. Khan, W. Pokam Mba, D. Rosenfeld, J. Tierney, and O. Zolina, 2021Water Cycle Changes. In Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, pp. 1055–1210, doi:10.1017/9781009157896.010. A drought can last for days, months or years. Drought often has large impacts on the ecosystems and agriculture of affected regions, and causes harm to the local economy. Annua ... [...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] |
Turkic Language
The Turkic languages are a language family of more than 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia (Siberia), and West Asia. The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning from Mongolia to Northwest China, where Proto-Turkic is thought to have been spoken, from where they expanded to Central Asia and farther west during the first millennium. They are characterized as a dialect continuum. Turkic languages are spoken by some 200 million people. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish, spoken mainly in Anatolia and the Balkans; its native speakers account for about 38% of all Turkic speakers, followed by Uzbek. Characteristic features such as vowel harmony, agglutination, subject-object-verb order, and lack of grammatical gender, are almost universal within the Turkic family. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility, up ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Central Asia
Central Asia is a region of Asia consisting of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The countries as a group are also colloquially referred to as the "-stans" as all have names ending with the Persian language, Persian suffix "-stan" (meaning ) in both respective native languages and most other languages. The region is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the southwest, European Russia to the northwest, China and Mongolia to the east, Afghanistan and Iran to the south, and Siberia to the north. Together, the five Central Asian countries have a total population of around million. In the pre-Islamic and early Islamic eras ( and earlier) Central Asia was inhabited predominantly by Iranian peoples, populated by Eastern Iranian-speaking Bactrians, Sogdians, Khwarezmian language, Chorasmians, and the semi-nomadic Scythians and Dahae. As the result of Turkic migration, Central Asia also became the homeland for the Kazakhs, Kyrgyzs, Volga Tatars, Tatars, Turkmens, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Salt Pan (geology)
Natural salt pans or salt flats are flat expanses of ground covered with salt and other minerals, usually shining white under the sun. They are found in deserts and are natural formations (unlike salt evaporation ponds, which are artificial). A salt pan forms by evaporation of a water pool, such as a lake or pond. This happens in climates where the rate of water evaporation exceeds the rate of that is, in a desert. If the water cannot drain into the ground, it remains on the surface until it evaporates, leaving behind minerals precipitated from the salt ions Solution (chemistry), dissolved in the water. Over thousands of years, the minerals (usually salts) accumulate on the surface. These minerals reflect the sun's rays and often appear as white areas. Salt pans can be dangerous. The crust of salt can conceal a quagmire of mud that can engulf a truck. The Qattara Depression in the eastern Sahara Desert contains many such traps which served as strategic barriers during World War ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Soil Crust
Soil crusts are soil surface layers that are distinct from the rest of the bulk soil, often hardened with a platy surface. Depending on the manner of formation, soil crusts can be biological or physical. Biological soil crusts are formed by communities of microorganisms A microorganism, or microbe, is an organism of microscopic size, which may exist in its single-celled form or as a colony of cells. The possible existence of unseen microbial life was suspected from antiquity, with an early attestation in ... that live on the soil surface whereas physical crusts are formed by physical impact such as that of raindrops. Biological soil crusts Biological soil crusts are communities of living organisms on the soil surface in arid- and semi-arid ecosystems. They are found throughout the world with varying species composition and cover depending on topography, soil characteristics, climate, plant community, microhabitats, and disturbance regimes. Biological soil crusts perfor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Filamentous Cyanobacteria
Cyanobacterial morphology refers to the form or shape of cyanobacteria. Cyanobacteria are a large and diverse phylum of bacteria defined by their unique combination of pigments and their ability to perform oxygenic photosynthesis. Cyanobacteria often live in colonial aggregates that can take a multitude of forms. Of particular interest among the many species of cyanobacteria are those that live colonially in elongate hair-like structures, known as trichomes. These filamentous species can contain hundreds to thousands of cells. They often dominate the upper layers of microbial mats found in extreme environments such as hot springs, hypersaline water, deserts and polar regions, as well as being widely distributed in more mundane environments. Many filamentous species are also motile, gliding along their long axis, and displaying photomovement by which a trichome modulates its gliding according to the incident light. The latter has been found to play an important role in guiding ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daryalyktakyr
The Daryalyktakyr Plain (; ), is an alluvial plain in the Kyzylorda Region, Kazakhstan.Google Earth The plain stretches across Zhalagash, Syrdarya and Shieli districts of Kyzylorda Region. A gas pipeline was built across the plain in 2012. The Shieli-Telikol Canal runs from north to south at the eastern edge. Geography The Daryalyktakyr lies north of the lower reaches of the Syr Darya and corresponds to an ancient channel where the river flowed. It extends roughly from WNW to ESE for a length of between the area to the north of Zhosaly town in the west and the Telikol lakes in the east. It is a large, elongated takir zone to the north of the current river channel covered with a top layer of alluvial sediments of mixed sand and clay. There are some solonetz and solonchak areas, as well as some small lakes and swamps at the southern edge. The Karaozek river, a right tributary of the Syr Darya, flows westwards along the southern limits of the plain.''Kazakhstan National Enc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jayne Belnap
Jayne Belnap (born February 2, 1952) is an American soil ecologist. Her expertise lies in desert ecologies and grassland ecosystems. In 2008, she was recognised by the Ecological Society of America as one of the most outstanding ecologists in the United States. In 2010 and 2013, she received awards from the United States Department of Interior as one of the most outstanding women in science. In 2015, she was elected as a fellow of the Ecological Society of America. Biography Belnap completed two undergraduate degrees (in biology and natural history) at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1980; a master's in ecology from Stanford University in 1983; and a PhD in botany from Brigham Young University in 1991. After completing her undergraduate and master's degrees, she became a seasonal botanist at Canyonlands National Park. In 1987, she joined the United States Department of Interior as a scientist. Belnap now works as a research ecologist for the United States Geologic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Soil Crust
Soil crusts are soil surface layers that are distinct from the rest of the bulk soil, often hardened with a platy surface. Depending on the manner of formation, soil crusts can be biological or physical. Biological soil crusts are formed by communities of microorganisms A microorganism, or microbe, is an organism of microscopic size, which may exist in its single-celled form or as a colony of cells. The possible existence of unseen microbial life was suspected from antiquity, with an early attestation in ... that live on the soil surface whereas physical crusts are formed by physical impact such as that of raindrops. Biological soil crusts Biological soil crusts are communities of living organisms on the soil surface in arid- and semi-arid ecosystems. They are found throughout the world with varying species composition and cover depending on topography, soil characteristics, climate, plant community, microhabitats, and disturbance regimes. Biological soil crusts perfor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
