Uzbekistan's geography: two borrowed rivers and a vanished sea

Why no river leaves the country

Uzbekistan is landlocked, and every country around it is landlocked too, so goods bound for an ocean port cross at least two borders. The Wikipedia geography article names Liechtenstein as the only other state in that position. The land stretches 1,425 kilometres from west to east and 930 kilometres from north to south, and it lies inside a set of closed basins: the Kyzylkum swallows some rivers, and the rest drain towards the Aral Sea.

Uzbekistan borders all four of the other Central Asian republics, and Afghanistan as well. The Factbook figures reproduced on Wikipedia put the land boundaries at 6,221 kilometres in all: 2,203 with Kazakhstan, 1,621 with Turkmenistan, 1,161 with Tajikistan, 1,099 with Kyrgyzstan and 137 with Afghanistan, along the Amu Darya. Uzbekistan also holds four small exclaves inside Kyrgyzstan.

The FAO divides the country between two river systems. The Amu Darya basin covers 81.5% of it and the Syr Darya basin 13.5%. Most of the Amu Darya's flow is generated in Tajikistan, and the river first runs along the Afghan border before crossing Turkmenistan and returning to Uzbekistan for its lower reach. The Syr Darya forms inside Uzbekistan where the Naryn and the Qoradaryo meet, and most of its flow is generated upstream in Kyrgyzstan. Britannica counts more than 600 streams in the country, but much of their water escapes through evaporation and seepage or is taken into irrigation.

Uzbekistan's own territory generates about 9.54 cubic kilometres of river flow a year, about half of it in each basin. The rest arrives from upstream under agreements that date from the end of the Soviet Union. A five-country agreement of 18 February 1992 kept the Soviet allocations in force, and an agreement with Turkmenistan signed at Türkmenabat in January 1996 divides the Amu Darya equally between the two at the Kerki gauge. The FAO puts the dependency ratio, the share of renewable water that originates outside the country, at 80%.

What the desert country is made of

Britannica describes nearly four-fifths of the territory, the sun-dried west, as having the appearance of a wasteland. The Wikipedia geography article puts the deserts at almost 80% of the country, about 360,000 of 450,000 square kilometres, while the FAO's profile gives 60% for desert, steppe and semi-arid land together.

In the north-west the Turan Plain rises only 60 to 90 metres above sea level around the Aral Sea in Karakalpakstan. To the west it becomes the Ustyurt Plateau, a region of low ridges, salt marshes, sinkholes and caverns, and to the south-east it merges with the Kyzylkum, whose name means red sand and which Uzbekistan shares with Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Small hills break the Kyzylkum's flatness, and the Mirzachol desert lies south-west of Tashkent between spurs of the Tien Shan and the Turkestan and Nuratau ranges.

Part of this desert has been listed by UNESCO since 2023 as the Cold Winter Deserts of Turan, a serial property shared with Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Uzbekistan's components are the Southern Ustyurt National Park and three parts of the Saigachy reserve, managed as wilderness. The listing rests on saxaul woodland, sagebrush and saltwort vegetation and on animals adapted to very cold winters and hot summers, among them the saiga and the goitered gazelle.

Where the mountains rise in the east

Mountains occupy the east and south-east, where the western Tien Shan and the Gissar and Alay ranges rise; the Tien Shan climbs higher in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The Chatkal, Kurama, Pskem and Ugam ranges belong to the western Tien Shan; the Gissar and Alay stand across the Fergana Valley to the south. The FAO puts the peaks at about 4,500 metres.

The sources do not agree on the highest point. The catalogue's own record gives Khazret Sultan at 4,643 metres, the height the Wikipedia country article attributes to a national book of records published in 2007. Britannica names Beshtor Peak in the Pskem range at 4,299 metres, and the Factbook figures reproduced in the Wikipedia geography article give Alpomish Peak at 4,668 metres. The lowest point is Sarygamysh Lake on the Turkmen border, a lake filled by drainage water from irrigated land; the record gives it 5 metres, and the same Factbook figures give 12 metres below sea level.

The western Tien Shan has been a transnational World Heritage property since 2016, shared with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. UNESCO lists it for its walnut-fruit forests and for the wild relatives of cultivated fruit trees that grow there, among them wild apricot, common walnut and the Sievers apple, which it describes as the progenitor of most of today's apple varieties. Snow leopard, argali and the endemic Menzbier's marmot live in its component parts. Britannica puts forest cover at less than 8% of the country, mostly on these eastern hills.

How the oases are watered

Settlement follows the water. The FAO traces irrigation in the country back more than 2,500 years to seven natural oases: the Tashkent valley, the Fergana Valley, the Zeravshan valley, the Kashkadarya and Surkhandarya valleys in the south-east, Khorezm and Karakalpakstan. The Fergana Valley, an area of about 21,440 square kilometres enclosed by mountains on three sides, receives 100 to 300 millimetres of rain a year, and only small patches of desert remain in it.

The Soviet period rebuilt the oases into a pumped and canalised system. Irrigated land grew from 1.38 million hectares in 1913 to 4.28 million hectares in 1994, and large-scale development began in the late 1950s, when the USSR decided Uzbekistan should specialise in cotton. The Hunger Steppe and the Karshi steppe were reclaimed with pumped water. By 1994 about 1,500 electric pumps lifted water onto 1.17 million hectares; the Karshi system alone raises 350 cubic metres a second from the Amu Darya through a height of 170 metres. The FAO measured the whole network at about 196,000 kilometres of canals and channels, 79% of the on-farm part of it unlined earth.

In 2005 Uzbekistan withdrew 56 cubic kilometres of water, 90% of it for agriculture. That withdrawal equalled 101% of the country's total actual renewable water resources in the same year, and the FAO notes that part of the return flow from drainage is used again. A cotton field needs 10,000 to 12,000 cubic metres a hectare, nearly all of it from irrigation, and the FAO recorded 2,141,000 hectares salinised by irrigation in 1994. Irrigated land produces more than 90% of the country's crops.

What happened to the Aral Sea

In the 1960s the Soviet Union diverted the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya to turn the plains of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan into cotton farms. Before then the two rivers had pooled in the Aral Sea, which covered 68,000 square kilometres in 1960. Britannica records that the sea lost as much as nine-tenths of both its volume and its surface area after 1961, that the Syr Darya delivered no appreciable water to it after about 1978 and that the flow from the Amu Darya became negligible in the first decade of this century.

NASA's satellite record shows the sea already split when its series begins in 2000. The southern connection between the eastern and western lobes of the South Aral was severed by 2001, the eastern lobe retreated fastest between 2005 and 2009, when drought cut off the Amu Darya, and it disappeared completely in 2014. Kazakhstan finished the Kok-Aral dike in 2005 to hold water in the North Aral, which has partly recovered, while limiting flow into the south. The South Aral, half of which lies in Uzbekistan, has mostly dried, and the Wikipedia country article states that only the southern part of its narrow western lobe remains permanently on Uzbek territory.

The exposed bed is now a desert of its own, the Aralkum. NASA records that salt and agricultural chemicals blow off it onto fields, that croplands have to be flushed with ever more river water and that winters have become colder and summers hotter and drier. The port of Moynaq, whose fishing industry employed about 30,000 people according to the Wikipedia article on the sea, lies 30 to 90 kilometres from the shore. Vozrozhdeniya, the island where the Soviet Union tested biological weapons from 1948, became part of the mainland after 2001 and is now shared by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

How hot and dry the climate runs

The climate is continental and arid. Most of the country, including the whole of the sparsely populated west and centre, is cold desert or cold steppe under the Köppen classification. The FAO gives an average annual rainfall of 264 millimetres, ranging from under 97 millimetres in the north-west to 425 millimetres in the mountains; in the Tashkent region it reaches 878 millimetres in places. Rain falls in winter and spring, mainly between October and April, and little falls from June to September.

July temperatures reach 42 to 47 °C on the plains and 25 to 30 °C in the mountains, while January lows reach minus 11 °C in the north and 2 to 3 °C in the south, according to the FAO. Frosts between late September and April allow only one crop a year in most places. Britannica notes that houses are built to the heat, with windows facing away from the sun and opening onto porches and courtyards planted with trees.

Where the ground has moved

Much of the country is seismically active, and the mountain areas most of all. The Wikipedia articles record the Andijan earthquake of 1902, the Fergana Valley earthquake of 2011 and the Tashkent earthquake of 1966, which destroyed much of the capital. The rebuilding that followed is itself on the World Heritage List: UNESCO inscribed ten modernist buildings and urban complexes of Tashkent in 2026, built between the 1960s and the early 1990s with seismic-resilient engineering along the axes of the reconstructed centre. Water infrastructure carries its own risk. When the dam of the Sardoba reservoir failed in May 2020, it flooded 35,000 hectares, killed six people and forced 111,000 to leave their homes, and the water crossed into Kazakhstan.

Who lives where the water is

The 2026 census shows a population concentrated in the east. Most people live in the oases and foothill basins, which Britannica describes as a network of canals among fields, orchards and vineyards. In 2011 the FAO measured more than 464 people a square kilometre in Andijan province in the Fergana Valley against eight in Karakalpakstan, which covers the north-west around the former sea. The country is divided into the Republic of Karakalpakstan, twelve regions and the city of Tashkent.

The census of January 2026 counted 54.5% of the population in urban areas. Outside Tashkent city the urban share runs from 38.1% in Khorezm Region, on the lower Amu Darya, to 66.2% in Namangan Region in the Fergana Valley.