Turkmenistan's geography: a desert watered from outside

How much of the country is desert

The area figures in circulation differ by about 3,000 square kilometres: the government gives 491.21 thousand square kilometres, the Geography of Turkmenistan article 491,120 and the main Turkmenistan article 488,100. The country runs about 1,100 kilometres from west to east and about 650 kilometres from north to south, between latitudes 35° and 43° north. Nearly 80% of it lies within the Turan Depression, a basin that slopes down from south to north and from east to west, and the average elevation is only 100 to 220 metres above sea level.

The Karakum, Turkmen Garagum or "black sand", fills the middle of that basin. Its area is usually given as about 350,000 square kilometres, but sources disagree on what share of the country that is: the Karakum Desert article says about 70%, while the main article on Turkmenistan says over 80% of the country is covered by the desert. The difference is mostly a matter of where the edges are drawn, since the sand runs into gravel plains, clay flats and semi-desert without a clear line.

The desert is divided into three parts: the raised Trans-Unguz Karakum in the north, the low Central Karakum and the south-eastern Karakum with its chain of salt marshes. Wind piles the sand into ridges 2 to 20 metres high that can run for several kilometres. Between them lie smooth clay pans, left where floodwater evaporated year after year, and marshy salt flats where groundwater rises to the surface; the Garaşor flat in the north-west covers 1,500 square kilometres. West of the Amu Darya the Sandykly sands are the southern tip of the Kyzylkum, most of which lies in Uzbekistan.

In the north-west the land rises again to the Ustyurt and Krasnovodsk plateaus.

Where the mountains rise along the edges

The mountains stand on the edges of the country. The Kopet Dag runs about 650 kilometres along the border with Iran, from near the Caspian to the Hari River, and Turkmenistan holds some 600 kilometres of its northern slopes. Its highest point on the Turkmen side, Mount Rizeh or Şahşah south-west of Ashgabat, is given as 2,912 metres in the geography articles and 2,940 metres in the Kopet Dag article. The range is made mostly of Cretaceous sedimentary rock folded during the collision of the Arabian, Iranian and Eurasian plates, and it is still moving. Strong earthquakes struck it in 1869, 1893, 1895, 1929, 1948 and 1994, and the one in 1948 destroyed Ashgabat.

The northern foothills of the Kopet Dag are where the country's oldest farming villages stood. Mud-brick houses at Jeitun were first occupied about 6000 BC, and the ruins of Parthian Nisa lie in the same foothills near Ashgabat. The woodlands of the range hold wild relatives of cultivated fruit: pomegranate, wild grape, fig, wild apple, wild pear and almond.

In the west the Great Balkan Range rises to 1,880 metres at Mount Arlan. In the far south-east, on the border with Uzbekistan, the Köýtendag or Kugitang range carries the country's highest summit, Aýrybaba. The record and the Geography of Turkmenistan article give its height as 3,139 metres; UNESCO's tentative listing and the main Turkmenistan article give 3,137 metres. UNESCO's tentative listing of the Kugitang range as a transboundary site, submitted in 2025, describes limestone ridges cut by canyons, many of them over 100 metres deep, and more than 300 caves, shafts and sinkholes in Jurassic limestone. The same listing records dinosaur footprints, juniper forest between 1,700 and 2,800 metres, and annual precipitation of up to 350 millimetres at altitude. The Turkmen side is protected as the Koytendag State Nature Reserve.

Which rivers reach the desert

Turkmenistan's rivers all rise outside it. The Amu Darya, historically the Oxus, forms in the Pamirs at the meeting of the Vakhsh and Panj, follows the border with Afghanistan for about 100 kilometres and enters Turkmenistan at Atamurat. It flows north past Türkmenabat, forms the border with Uzbekistan from Halkabat and no longer reaches the Aral Sea; its mouth lies in the dried-up bed of what was once the sea. Its name is said to come from Amul, the medieval city that is now Türkmenabat.

From the south, the Murghab and the Tejen flow out of the Hindu Kush and end in the sand, watering the oases of Mary and Tejen, which are known for their cotton. The fourth river, the Atrek, has the Sumbar and Chandyr as tributaries. Small streams on the northern slopes of the Kopet Dag are taken entirely for irrigation.

The desert has not always been dry of rivers. The Amu Darya has changed course several times in the past few thousand years, and from the 13th to the late 16th century part of it flowed west to the Caspian through a channel called the Uzboy. The country's lowest point, the Akjagaýa Depression in Sarygamysh Lake, lies close to 100 metres below sea level, and the lake's surface moves between about 110 and 60 metres below sea level as inflows change.

How the canal redrew the map

The Karakum Canal was built between 1954 and 1958 to take Amu Darya water across the southern desert. It runs 1,375 kilometres, passes through Ashgabat and ends near Bereket, and carries 13 to 20 cubic kilometres of water a year. Virtually all field crops in Turkmenistan are irrigated, and away from the natural rivers irrigation depends mainly on this canal. The canal also loses water on the way. The Geography of Turkmenistan article estimates that nearly half of the canal's water seeps out into lakes and salt marshes along its path, and that over-irrigation brings salt to the surface. In 1989 the country's Institute for Desert Studies put the area of salt-crusted clay flats at 10,000 square kilometres.

Drainage water now has a destination of its own. Golden Age Lake, under construction in the Karashor Depression of the Karakum, is designed to cover 2,000 square kilometres and to collect run-off from cotton fields through two main collectors: the Dashoguz Collector, 432 kilometres long, about half of it along the old Uzboy bed, and the Great Turkmen Collector from Lebap, 720 kilometres long.

Downstream, the effect of all Central Asian irrigation on the Aral Sea reached the north of the country. By 1994 the sea had lost an estimated 59,000 square kilometres of surface, and Daşoguz Province suffered the heaviest damage, with drinking water carrying bacteria at more than ten times the sanitary limit.

Where people live in a dry country

Settlement follows the water. Ashgabat, about 50 kilometres from the Iranian border, occupies an earthquake-prone oasis plain bounded by the Kopet Dag foothills to the south and the Karakum to the north, and the Karakum Canal runs through the city from east to west. The other large towns each sit on a water source or the coast: Mary in the Murghab oasis, Türkmenabat on the Amu Darya, Daşoguz in the north near the Uzbek border, and Türkmenbaşy and Balkanabat in the west.

The administrative map is drawn over the same pattern. There are five provinces, or welaýatlar: Ahal around the capital, Balkan in the west, Daşoguz in the north, Lebap in the east and Mary in the south. Ashgabat is a separate unit with the status of a province, and the government lists Arkadag, a new city in Ahal, as a city of state significance with its own legal status.

Below the provinces the government counts 37 districts, 48 cities, 70 settlements and 1,691 rural settlements. In the Karakum itself the Karakum Desert article gives an average of one person to every 6.5 square kilometres.

What the Caspian shore is like

To the west lies the Caspian Sea. Turkmenistan's coast is given as 1,748 kilometres in the main Turkmenistan article and as 1,768 kilometres in a note to the geography article, which elsewhere counts the Caspian border at 1,786 kilometres. Because the Caspian has no natural outlet to the ocean, Turkmenistan is classed as landlocked; ships reach the Black Sea only through the Volga and the Volga to Don canal. Oil has been drawn from fields on the Cheleken Peninsula, on this coast, since 1909. The Khazar State Reserve protects coastal wetlands used by migrating birds, and building began at the end of 2007 on the resort zone of Avaza near Türkmenbaşy. The government describes the sea there as having mineral mud springs and sandy beaches stretching for many kilometres.

How hot and dry the climate gets

Turkmenistan has a cold desert climate with strong continental swings. No mountains block the north, so Arctic air reaches the southern ranges in winter, while the Kopet Dag and the ranges of Afghanistan and Iran keep out moist air from the Indian Ocean. Summers are long, hot and dry, from May to September; winters are generally mild and dry, colder and damper in the north. What rain falls comes mostly between January and May, carried by air from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

Precipitation averages 300 millimetres a year in the Kopet Dag and 80 millimetres in the north-west, and some places in the Karakum average only 12 millimetres. Ashgabat receives about 225 millimetres. Average annual temperatures run from 17.5 °C in Ashgabat to 12.8 °C in Daşoguz on the Uzbek border. On 28 July 1983 the Repetek reserve south of Türkmenabat recorded 50.1 °C; Kerki on the Amu Darya reported 51.7 °C the same month, a figure never made official. The country has 235 to 240 sunny days a year, enough heat for extra-long-staple cotton.

The World Bank lists sharp rises in temperature and increased salinity among the effects of climate change the country is exposed to, and names water scarcity and deteriorating soil among the problems of its agriculture.

What lives in the cold winter deserts

Seven terrestrial ecoregions meet in Turkmenistan, among them the Kopet Dag woodlands and forest steppe, the Caspian lowland desert, the Badghyz and Karabil semi-desert and the Central Asian riparian woodlands. The Karakum's fauna includes goitered gazelle, tolai hare and corsac fox, with jerboas, lizards, snakes and turtles.

The Repetek reserve, where the 1983 temperature record was taken, lies in the central part of the eastern Karakum and became a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1978; its listed area is 251,318 hectares. UNESCO describes ridged, hummocky dunes with valley-like hollows between them and large stands of black saxaul, and counts 22 reptile species there along with a stable population of goitered gazelle. Around 40% of the local population works in livestock farming.

In 2023 UNESCO inscribed the Cold Winter Deserts of Turan, a property of 14 components across Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan covering 3,366,441 hectares. UNESCO describes these as deserts of very cold winters and hot summers, with saxaul woodland, sagebrush and saltwort vegetation, and globally threatened mammals such as the goitered gazelle and the urial. More of the country's landscapes appear on the national tentative list; see travel in Turkmenistan for the sites visitors reach.

The Geography of Turkmenistan article gives the land borders with Uzbekistan, Iran, Afghanistan and Kazakhstan as follows.