Lake Paiku
Encyclopedia
Lake Paiku -- in Tibetan
Standard Tibetan
Standard Tibetan is the most widely used spoken form of the Tibetan languages. It is based on the speech of Lhasa, an Ü-Tsang dialect belonging to the Central Tibetan languages. For this reason, Standard Tibetan is often called Central Tibetan...

 Paiku-Tso or -Tsho -- is at 4,591 meters (15,070 ft) elevation on the Tibetan Plateau
Tibetan Plateau
The Tibetan Plateau , also known as the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau is a vast, elevated plateau in Central Asia covering most of the Tibet Autonomous Region and Qinghai, in addition to smaller portions of western Sichuan, southwestern Gansu, and northern Yunnan in Western China and Ladakh in...

 at 28°55′N 85°35′E, 18 km south of the Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra River. The lake is 27 km (16.8 mi) long and 6 km (3.7 mi) wide at its narrowest. It is surrounded by mountains reaching 5,700 to 6,000 meters (19 to 20,000 ft). Streams fed by glaciers cascade to the valley floor but most sink into alluvial
Alluvium
Alluvium is loose, unconsolidated soil or sediments, eroded, deposited, and reshaped by water in some form in a non-marine setting. Alluvium is typically made up of a variety of materials, including fine particles of silt and clay and larger particles of sand and gravel...

 deposits before reaching the lake.

The surrounding catchment is an endorheic basin with no outlet. It would overflow into the Yarlung Tsangpo with a water level about 100 meters higher. The lake's brackish water is evidence that it has not overflowed in hundreds if not thousands of years.
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