Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Lake Urmia
Summary
Lake Urmia is an endorheic salt lake in Iran. The lake is located between the provinces of East Azerbaijan and West Azerbaijan in Iran, and west of the southern portion of the Caspian Sea. At its greatest extent, it was the largest lake in the Middle East and the sixth-largest saltwater lake on Earth, with a surface area of approximately , a length of , a width of , and a maximum depth of .
By late 2017, the lake had shrunk to 10% of its former size (and 1/60 of water volume in 1998) due to persistent general drought in Iran, but also the damming of the local rivers that flow into it, and the pumping of groundwater from the surrounding area. This dry spell was broken in 2019 and the lake is now filling up once again, due to both increased rain and water diversion from the Zab River by the Urmia Lake Research Programme.
Lake Urmia, along with its approximately 102 (former) islands, is protected as a national park by the Iranian Department of Environment.
Richard Nelson Frye suggested an Urartian origin for the name, while T. Burrow connected the origin of the name Urmia to Indo-Iranian urmi- "wave" and urmya- "undulating, wavy". A more likely etymology would be from Neo-Aramaic Assyrian-Chaldean spoken by the shrinking number of the ancient Christian population of the nearby city of Urmia, consisting of ur meaning "city," and mia meaning "water." Together, the "water city", what Urmia city is: a city on the waters of the eponymous lake. The name could also derive from the combination of the Assyrian Aramaic words Ur (ܐܘܪ; a common name for cities around Mesopotamia, meaning "city") and Mia (ܡܝܐ), "City of Water" referring to the city nearby.
Locally, the lake is referred to in Persian as Daryâče-ye Orumiye (دریاچهٔ ارومیه), in Azerbaijani as Urmu gölü (اۇرمۇ گؤلۆ). The traditional Armenian name is Kaputan tsov (Կապուտան ծով), literally "blue sea". Residents of Shahi Island refer to the lake in Azerbaijani as Daryā (دریا, meaning "Sea").
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.