Talk:Qarhan Playa

A fact from Qarhan Playa appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 21 October 2019 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows: Did you know... that Dabusun Lake (pictured) is the largest remaining lake in China's Qarhan Playa, which 30,000 years ago held a single lake spreading over at least 25,000 km2 (9,700 sq mi)? A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2019/October. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Qarhan Playa.

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This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions (color, defense, traveled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

"Qarhan Lake" or "Salt Lake" does seem to be more common in PRC sources like Shanghai Daily and an official sign for the geological park reads "Chaerhan Salt Lake National Mine Park in Gomud, Qnghai". As should be clear from the "Gomud" and "Qnghai", though, those translations aren't particularly well considered and are just a direct calque of the Chinese name.

Zheng, who led the first geological expeditions into the area in the '50s and kept writing as its exploitation took off, uses "playa" and so do most of the other geologists and reliable academic/scholarly sources who discuss the place. It seems much more helpful to use some such phrasing and draw a line under its non-lake status, since (for the last 25,000-odd years) this isn't even occasionally a single lake and misunderstandings lead to claims like this being "China's biggest salt lake" (including here where they even discuss it being a playa) when it's nothing of the sort. — LlywelynII 14:01, 4 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note that various Chinese sources claim it derives from Mongolian meaning "Salt World" (盐的世界) or "Salt Pond" (盐泽) and that's leaked over into English sources (here, here, here). That seems entirely false. The word газар (gazar) might explain that odd "world" translation since its literal sense ("place") is figuratively extended to talk about the world, but (a) most Mongolian constructions with gazar use it as the second element: i.e., if it were a "salt-place", potentially mistranslated "salt-world", the qar should've been the second element of the name. (b) Even if Wiktionary's Mongolian coverage is spotty, in this wonderfully thorough dictionary there's nothing remotely similar to "qar", "han", or "Qarhan" in Mongolian with the sense of "salt", "salt flat", "salt lake", or "salt place". There's хорон (horon) which is vaguely similar (although Chinese q should be transcribing Mongolian ч or ц) but it means "salt" in the sense of "salty language": i.e., "venomous", "unpleasant", "acid", etc.

Instead, just like Qaidam gets called Mongolian but is actually Tibetan, that looks like what's going on here. The Tibetan tshwa ("salt") got transcribed into Mongolian as ца... which got transcribed by Chinese romanizers as qa... (pinyin q is a relative of ch, which is English's spelling of phonetic /ts/). If it had been transliterated directly from Tibetan, ZWPY would've turned tshwa... into ca... instead. [Edit: every Chinese source I can find only glosses it as Mongolian in reference to salt, never with any Mongolian text. The closest Tibetan equivalent I can find is ཚྭ་ཐང་ or ཚྭ་ཐང་། (tschwa thang), where the second word means "plain" or "plains"—e.g., salt flat. Google doesn't offer Tibetan translation, though, so hard to check if any of the pages using it might reference Qarhan.] — LlywelynII 16:26, 6 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, the fine people of StackExchange found the exact Qing-era glossary that first standardized the area's placenames. 察尔汗 is a variant of the original 察罕, which was a transcription of the Mongol word for "white". Apparently, though, the full name would've been something longer—possibly 察罕鄂博, 察罕哈達, 察罕托輝烏魯, or 察罕托羅海—meaning "white... something" before the Chinese decided the local name was too damned long and cut it down to the first word. Anyone with better Chinese and/or Mongolian able to figure out which one and what the original idea was? — LlywelynII 16:07, 7 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This page from a nearby geological park finally glosses the name fairly correctly into Chinese as 白...茫茫的世界 ("white... vast world"), with the "world" presumably being a mistaken/intentionally-overpoetic sense of the Mongolian word mentioned above. — LlywelynII 21:10, 12 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

...should apparently only refer to this playa. I've finally tracked down all the current variant spellings and names of the playa's lakes and the only one of them that ever gets mistakenly called 'Qarhan Lake' is Dabusun itself. The previous reference from Garrett (who claims there's a 'Qarhan Lake', 'E. Qarhan Lake', and 'W. Qarhan Lake') apparently comes from his having confused it with Taijinar or misunderstood a Chinese author, who was presumably badly translated into English and meant either the Chaerhan Yanhu (the whole playa) or the Qarhan Subbasin, which has the smaller lakes of Tuanjie and Xiezuo. — LlywelynII 15:05, 10 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The geologists currently being cited seem more reliable than this Shanghai Daily article, but it is more recent and uses a different number for the playa's potassium reserves. It's worth noting, though, that the geologist's "360 million metric tons" is estimated mass of actual potassium oxide whereas the "274 million tons" in the article seems to be theoretical amounts of extractable pure potassium, which means the amounts might be roughly comparable. (K₂O should lose around a fifth of its mass if you took out the oxygen, neh?) — LlywelynII 14:01, 4 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Meanwhile, Du & al. give 194 million metric tons, but are talking about KCl instead of K or K₂O... — LlywelynII 13:04, 9 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yu & al. say there are 6 permanent and 7 intermittent streams that contribute to the basin but don't specify what they are. Du & al. report that there's also the Zaohuo and Halawusu Rivers. The former flows into the southwest corner below Suli Lake but apparently doesn't form a lake itself. This Chinese map calls it the Xiao or Little Zaohuo (小灶火河); it also gives separate names to branches of the Golmud. The latter isn't explained. They also discuss something called "Shell Bar" as if it were a lake. — LlywelynII 13:00, 9 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Gatoclass (talk) 00:55, 14 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

( Comment or view )

( Article history links:

• Qarhan Playa
• Dabusun Lake

)

Dabusun Lake, the largest actual lake in the Qarhan Playa

• ... that Qarhan (pictured)—sometimes called the largest salt lake in China—isn't a lake at all, but an enormous playa?
  • ALT1:... that the Qarhan Playa (pictured) alternated between being a freshwater and saltwater lake nine times in the last million years, giving it enormous reserves of salt, potash, and lithium?
  • ALT2:... that an accidental discovery in the Qarhan Playa (pictured) in the 1950s eventually reduced China's dependence on Canadian potash?
  • ALT3:... that Dabusun Lake (pictured) in China's Qarhan Playa has a mean annual temperature of only 0.1 °C (32 °F) despite lying at the same latitude as Greece and Virginia?

• Comment: Kindly don't add extraneous links to the hooks above. If people want to learn more about playas &c., they can click through to the article I've worked on, learn some stuff, and move on from there.
• Reviewed: Changsha Kingdom & The Haunted Island

Created by LlywelynII (talk). Self-nominated at 04:36, 6 August 2019 (UTC).[reply]

• These two article are new enough and long enough. The image is appropriately licensed, the hook facts are cited inline, the articles are neutral and I detected no copyright or plagiarism issues. Two QPQs have been done. Approving ALT3 which is the only hook mentioning both articles. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 17:32, 21 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Hi, I came by to promote ALT3, but I don't see anything about Greece, Algeria, or Virginia in the cite (footnote 6). @LlywelynII: would you like to use one of the one-article hooks? Yoninah (talk) 21:01, 10 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• 37th parallel north is cited and the other places on that latitude, provided here for illustration, fall under WP:BLUE. Do you really plan on insisting that an article on a Chinese lake needs to add separate additional citations for the latitude of each of Virginia, Algeria, and Greece despite having an entire dedicated article on the point, aside from the linked articles about those places? Seems rather absurd and WP:OVERCITEy/ISR to me when there's not a question at all that the information and the point being made are completely accurate. — LlywelynII 03:59, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• @Llywelyn: can we use one of the single-article hooks with the image? Yoninah (talk) 09:35, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Re-ping @LlywelynII:. Yoninah (talk) 09:35, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Re-ping @Yoninah:. Why would you need to? I wrote and QPQd 2 articles and there's no actual problem with the hook as is. — LlywelynII 12:25, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Replacing tick as I don't think we need to quibble about places being at the same latitude, it's not as if anyone is going to dispute these facts. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 05:49, 18 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hook was pulled from Prep by @Gatoclass: as possible copyvio WP:OR. — Maile (talk) 23:32, 11 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• I understood that it was because "hook appears to be based on WP:OR", as noted in their edit summary and at Wikipedia_talk:Did_you_know#The_Dabusun_Lake_hook. RebeccaGreen (talk) 03:58, 12 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Please note that the nominator has been mostly inactive over the past two months or so, apart from a single edit on October 1. Any article or hook issues may need to be worked on without them. Considering the issues with ALT3, perhaps the only option could be to go with separate hooks for both articles? Pinging earlier commenters and WT:DYK discussion participants @Amakuru, Maile66, Feminist, BlueMoonset, Black Kite, Jo-Jo Eumerus, Gatoclass, and Yoninah: as well as the reviewer Cwmhiraeth. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 02:18, 13 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Why not simply promote one of the other hooks? Cwmhiraeth (talk) 04:59, 13 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The other hooks only mention Qarhan Playa but not Dabusun Lake, and we should try to respect the nominator's wishes of Dabusun Lake appearing on the Main Page in some form. We could promote one of the other hooks, but that would mean a new hook would be needed that focuses solely on Dabusun Lake, which would need to be reviewed and promoted separately. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 05:34, 13 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• How about something like
• ALT4:... that Dabusun Lake (pictured) is the largest remaining lake in China's Qarhan Playa, which 30,000 years ago held a single lake spreading over at least 25,000 km2 (9,700 sq mi)? (175 characters)
• ALT5:... that Dabusun Lake (pictured) is the largest remaining lake in China's Qarhan Playa, which alternated between being a freshwater and saltwater lake nine times in the last million years? (184 characters)

RebeccaGreen (talk) 08:31, 13 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The Mandarin pronunciation given on Wiktionary [1] is different from the one we give here. Wiktionary or Wikipedia (or both) are in error or missing information. Geographyinitiative (talk) 05:27, 21 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]