Kazakhstan's geography: a dry country whose rivers mostly never reach the sea

Where Kazakhstan's rivers end

Three rivers leave the country for the ocean. The Irtysh, the Ishim and the Tobol, called the Ertis, the Esil and the Tobyl in Kazakh, rise in the south-eastern highlands or cross from them, run north-west into Russia and reach the Arctic through the West Siberian basin. Britannica gives the Irtysh's flow into that catchment as some 28 billion cubic metres a year. Everything else drains inward. The Ural, called the Zhayyq in Kazakh, runs south into the Caspian Sea; the Syr Darya feeds the Aral; others end in Lake Balkhash or Lake Tengiz; and many smaller rivers simply disappear into the steppe and the desert of the centre and south, or dry out in summer.

The counts depend on who did the counting. The presidential office gives 8,500 rivers and 48,000 large and small lakes; Britannica gives about 7,000 streams. Lake Balkhash in the east is partly fresh and partly saline. Lakes Zaisan and Alakol also lie in the eastern half of the country.

The south and west are short of water. In the late 1970s Soviet planners drew up a scheme to divert the Irtysh south to irrigate the deserts of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan; it was cancelled in 1986 over its cost and its likely effect on the land. The Syr Darya, on which southern farms depend, has, according to Britannica, scarcely reached the Aral Sea at all since the late 1970s.

How far the country reaches

The record gives an area of 2,724,900 square kilometres. The Wikipedia geography article splits it into 2,699,700 square kilometres of land and 25,200 of water. Britannica measures the country at about 2,930 kilometres from east to west, and it lies between latitudes 40° and 56° north and longitudes 46° and 88° east. The Ural River is taken as the line between Europe and Asia, so the strip of the west that lies beyond it counts as Europe.

Five countries share the land border, and the published lengths do not agree. The figures below are the presidential office's and the Wikipedia geography article's, which gives a total about 160 kilometres longer.

The Caspian Sea forms the south-western edge. Kazakhstan has no coast on an ocean, and the Wikipedia article gives its shore on the Caspian as 1,894 kilometres. The Aral Sea, or what is left of it, is divided with Uzbekistan.

What covers the land between desert and steppe

Most of Kazakhstan is dry. The presidential office's land cover figures are desert 44%, semi-desert 14%, steppe 26% and forest 5.5%. Britannica describes the shape of the ground instead: lowlands make up a third of the territory, hilly plateaus and plains nearly half and low mountains about a fifth.

What lies on the plains and in the deserts

The Kazakh Steppe covers about 804,500 square kilometres, a third of the country, in grassland and sand. In the west the Caspian Depression lies below sea level, and the Karagiye Depression in Mangystau province reaches 132 metres below it. South of the Caspian Depression are the Ustyurt Plateau and the Tupqaragan peninsula. Sand fills the Greater Barsuki and Aral Karakum deserts near the Aral Sea, the Betpaqdala in the interior and the Moiynqum and Kyzylkum in the south. Most of these carry a thin cover of plants fed by groundwater: wormwood and tamarisk, and feather grass on the drier plains.

The soil decides where crops grow. Britannica describes very fertile soils in the far north giving way to poorer, alkaline soils in the middle and south. The northern plains are the most intensively farmed land in the country; elsewhere fields fringe the mountains of the south and east, and irrigation carries cultivation along the river valleys into the deserts.

Central Kazakhstan is an undulating upland scattered with salt lakes, most of whose water has evaporated, with higher ground in the Ulytau Mountains to the west and the Chingiz-Tau to the east.

Where the mountains stand

The high ground is all on the edges. The Altai sends three ridges into the east, the Tarbagatai and the Dzungarian Alatau lie further south, and the Tien Shan forms the southern frontier with Kyrgyzstan. Khan Tengri, where Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and China meet, reaches 6,995 metres of rock and 7,010 metres with its ice cap. The snow on the Altai and the Tien Shan is the source of most of the country's fresh water. The Charyn River has cut an 80-kilometre canyon through a red sandstone plateau about 200 kilometres east of Almaty, with walls of 150 to 300 metres, where a rare ash, Fraxinus sogdiana, survived the Ice Age. The endangered plants of Kazakhstan include the wild apple, Malus sieversii, and several wild tulips, among them Tulipa greigii.

How much of the country is wooded depends on the definition. The presidential office gives 5.5%, Britannica about 3% and the Wikipedia land-use table 1.2%.

How the continental climate swings

Distance from any ocean sets the climate, and the presidential office says as much. Britannica gives average January temperatures of minus 19 to minus 16 °C in the north and centre and minus 5 to minus 1.4 °C in the south; average July temperatures reach 20 °C in the north and 29 °C in the south. The recorded extremes are minus 45 °C and 45 °C. Precipitation runs from 200 to 300 millimetres a year in the north and centre, more in the southern mountain valleys, and the winter is the driest season.

Floods come from snowmelt and spring rain, and they are common in the north and centre. In April 2017, after a winter with snow about 60% above average, heavy rain temporarily displaced thousands of people, and the British Foreign Office records widespread flooding across much of the north and west in April 2024. The same office lists the other hazards: an active seismic zone at Almaty, mudslides and landslides in the south-eastern mountains, wildfires in the forests of the east in 2023 and grass fires on the steppe.

Why the Aral Sea shrank and partly returned

The Aral Sea once covered 68,000 square kilometres and held more than 1,100 islands. In the early 1960s Soviet planners diverted the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya to irrigate cotton, melons, rice and cereals, and the sea began to shrink. By 1993 it had lost an estimated 60% of its volume and split into separate basins; by 2007 it was at 10% of its original size. The former port of Aralsk ended up more than 70 kilometres from the water, the fish died as the salinity rose, and wind carried salt and pesticide dust off the exposed bed onto the farmland around it.

Kazakhstan's response was to wall off its own part. Work on the Kok-Aral dam, 13 kilometres across the channel between the northern and southern basins, finished in August 2005. By 2006 the level of the small northern sea had risen to 38 metres from a low under 30 metres, against 42 metres considered the level of viability, and commercial fish stocks had returned. The World Bank lists the restoration of the Northern Aral Sea and a doubling of its water volume among the results of its projects in Kazakhstan. The southern basin, half of which lies in Uzbekistan, receives only the water that overflows the dam through a sluice.

The International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea was set up on 23 March 1993, and in January 1994 Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan pledged 1% of their budgets to the sea's recovery. The shrinking sea also exposed a Soviet secret. Vozrozhdeniya Island, where a bioweapons laboratory was set up in 1948, became a peninsula in 2001 and then part of the mainland, and the area is now shared by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

The Caspian moved the other way. Its level rose from 1978, and more than 10,000 square kilometres of Atyrau province flooded at the northern end.

What the Soviet decades left in the ground

Two Soviet programmes changed the land itself. The Virgin Lands campaign of the 1950s and 1960s ploughed the northern grasslands for dry wheat, and wind carried much of the soil away; by the mid-1990s an estimated 60% of the country's pasture was in some stage of desertification. Near Semey, the former Semipalatinsk, the Soviet Union tested almost 500 nuclear weapons, 116 of them above ground, often without moving or warning the people who lived nearby. Industrial cities carry a different load: ageing factories discharge into the air and the groundwater, and Almaty's air has worsened with the growth in private car ownership since independence. Britannica records that the soils around Semey were contaminated and that agriculture in the north-east has been held back as a result. The Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement, founded in February 1989 by the poet Olzhas Suleimenov, gathered more than two million signatures against the tests in its first week; a test ban took effect in 1990 and the site was closed in 1991.

Which wild places are protected

Three natural sites in Kazakhstan are on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Saryarka, inscribed in 2008, joins the Naurzum and Korgalzhyn reserves, 450,344 hectares of steppe and fresh and salt lakes on the watershed between rivers flowing north to the Arctic and south to the Aral-Irtysh basin. It is a stopover for birds flying from Africa, Europe and South Asia to Siberia, among them the Siberian white crane and the Dalmatian pelican, and a refuge for the saiga antelope, which poaching reduced. Western Tien-Shan was inscribed in 2016 and the Cold Winter Deserts of Turan in 2023. A fourth listed landscape is cultural: in the Tanbaly gorge of the arid Chu-Ili mountains some 5,000 rock carvings in 48 groups, dated from the second half of the 2nd millennium BC to the early 20th century, record the herding and rituals of pastoral peoples.

Animals once lost are being brought back. Przewalski's horse has been returned to the steppe after nearly two centuries. On 31 July 2026 a female Amur tiger was released into the Ile-Balkhash nature reserve, the first tiger in the country since 1948, with three more under observation for later release. The plains also carry antelope and elk; the hills wolf, bear and snow leopard; and the Caspian sturgeon, herring and roach.

Where the people of Kazakhstan live

The Bureau of National Statistics counted 20,618,796 people on 1 September 2026: 13,236,041 in towns and 7,382,755 in the countryside. The spread is thin. Britannica counts fewer than 120 settlements classed as a city or town in 2025 and more than 6,000 auyl, small farm villages. Slavs live mostly on the northern plains in large villages that grew out of collective and state farms; sheep herders live on the drier plains to the south, often in yurts.

The country is divided into 17 regions and three cities of national significance: Astana, Almaty and Shymkent. A fourth city, Baikonur, sits inside about 6,000 square kilometres leased to Russia until 2050 around the launch site. Kazakhstan: history covers how the capital moved north from Almaty to Astana in 1997, and Kazakhstan: economy what the ground under the steppe yields.