The Karakum Desert is a sand and clay desert in Central Asia that covers roughly 350,000 km² (140,000 sq mi), about 70 percent of Turkmenistan, making it the world’s 12th-largest desert. Its name means “Black Sand” in Turkic. It stretches east to west from the Amu Darya river, which separates it from Uzbekistan’s Kyzylkum, towards the Caspian Sea, and from the Kopet Dag mountains on the Iranian border north to the Amu Darya delta near the dying Aral Sea. Geographers split it into three parts: the raised northern Trans-Unguz Karakum, the low Central Karakum and the south-eastern Karakum with its chain of salt marshes. Rain is scarce, about 70 to 150 mm (3 to 6 in) a year, and so are people, roughly one for every 6.5 km². A journey from east to west, beginning at the river that feeds it, shows how each of those parts fits together.
Türkmenabat and Kerki: Starting on the Amu Darya
The eastern edge of the Karakum is not sand but water. The Amu Darya, the ancient Oxus, runs north-west along Turkmenistan’s border with Uzbekistan, and on its banks sits Türkmenabat, the country’s second city, with about 231,000 people in 2022. It stands at 187 m above sea level. Its old name, Çärjew, comes from the Persian for “four streams”, and in antiquity the town was Āmul, a crossroads where caravan routes split towards Bukhara, Khiva and Merv. The modern city grew from a Cossack settlement founded in 1886 to finish the Trans-Caspian Railway, which still crosses the desert. The permanent railway bridge over the river was not finished until 1901; before then trains rattled over a rickety wooden structure that floods often damaged.
Upstream, the town of Kerki sits on a plain on the left bank. It was renamed Atamyrat in 1999 after the father of President Saparmurat Niyazov, and changed back to Kerki in 2017. A road bridge to Kerkichi on the far bank replaced a pontoon crossing in 2013. From this river corridor, every drop of water that makes the southern Karakum habitable is pumped, channelled or diverted westward.
Repetek and the Black Saxaul Dunes
The irrigated strip ends abruptly about 70 km south of Türkmenabat. Beyond it begins the East Karakum, home to the best-studied patch of sand in Central Asia. The Russian Geographical Society opened a desert research station at Repetek in 1912, and in 1928 it became the Repetek Biosphere State Reserve, covering 346 km². Its dunes form ridges 15 to 20 m high, separated by valley-like hollows. Black saxaul (Haloxylon aphyllum), a tough, nearly leafless tree, binds parts of the sand, and the reserve is known for the desert monitor lizard, called zemzen locally. It also shelters goitered gazelles, a species listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN.
Repetek holds a less welcome distinction. On 28 July 1983 its weather station recorded 50.1 °C (122.2 °F), the highest temperature ever measured in Turkmenistan and in the former Soviet Union. Rain here is light and erratic and falls mainly in winter and autumn, yet the reserve’s flora still counts 21 trees, 104 grasses and 197 fungi. Elsewhere in the Karakum, wildlife is similarly sparse: darkling beetles, termites, jerboas, the tolai hare and the corsac fox are typical residents.
The Karakum Canal, the Murghab and the Ruins of Merv
Heading south-west, a traveller reaches the waterway that remade the desert. The Karakum Canal, dug between 1954 and 1958, carries about 13 km³ of Amu Darya water a year across the southern Karakum. At 1,375 km (854 mi) it is one of the largest irrigation canals in the world, and much of it is navigable. It replaced an earlier Stalin-era scheme, the Main Turkmen Canal, which was to run from near Nukus towards Krasnovodsk but was abandoned after Stalin died in 1953. The new canal opened huge tracts to cotton, and it is also a major reason the Aral Sea shrank: since the early 1980s a new desert, the Aralkum, has spread over about 40,000 km² of former seabed to the north.
The canal’s first great oasis is Mary, where the Murghab River, after an 850 km journey from the Paropamisus mountains of Afghanistan, ends by merging with the canal’s water. Mary had 167,027 people in 2022. It was founded in 1884 as a Russian military post about 30 km from the ruins of ancient Merv, a Silk Road city that may have been the largest in the world in the 12th and 13th centuries, with perhaps 500,000 inhabitants. Merv was the capital of the Great Seljuk Empire before Mongol forces sacked it in 1221. The site has been protected as the State Historical and Cultural Park “Ancient Merv” since 1987, and the brick mausoleum of the Seljuk sultan Sanjar still rises over the plain.
Merv was not the first city here. About 60 km north of Mary, deeper into the sand, lies Gonur Depe, a Bronze Age settlement occupied from about 2400 to 1600 BCE and the main centre of the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex. Viktor Sarianidi collected its first pottery in 1972 and excavated it from 1974 until 2013, uncovering a palace, temples with fire altars and a necropolis of more than 3,000 graves on a site of roughly 55 hectares. That such a place now sits in open desert shows how far the Murghab’s delta once reached.
Tejen and Ashgabat Under the Kopet Dag
West of Mary the southern rim of the desert runs along the foot of the Kopet Dag, the range that runs for about 650 km along the border with Iran and, on the Turkmen side, rises to 2,940 m at Kuh-e Rizeh. Rivers from the south die in the sand here. The Tejen, known upstream in Afghanistan as the Hari, flows about 1,100 km from central Afghanistan, forms the Tejen oasis and then simply disappears into the Karakum.
Ashgabat, the capital, occupies an oasis plain wedged between the Kopet Dag foothills and the desert, about 50 km from the Iranian border. Its population was 1,030,063 at the 2022 census. The city was founded in 1881 on an Ahal Teke tribal village, was largely destroyed by the 1948 earthquake, and has since been rebuilt in white marble. The Karakum Canal runs through the city from east to west, which is why a desert capital can keep fountains and parks. Beyond Ashgabat the canal continues towards Bereket and Gyzylarbat, following the same mountain-foot corridor as the railway, which reached Ashgabat and Merv in 1886.
Darvaza: Into the Central Karakum
From Ashgabat a road strikes almost due north into the low Central Karakum, the emptiest part of the desert. Here dunes alternate with takyrs, flat clay pans that hold water briefly after rain. About 260 km north of the capital, near the village of Darvaza, is the most visited spot in the interior: a collapsed gas cavern 60 to 70 m across and about 30 m deep, burning since 1971 according to the most common account. Soviet drilling is usually said to have punctured the cavern, after which engineers set it alight to stop poisonous gas spreading, although some local geologists date the collapse to the 1960s and the fire to the 1980s.
The area was declared a nature reserve in 2013. In January 2022 President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow ordered a commission to find a way to put the fire out, citing harm to health and to the gas industry. By 2025 authorities said the blaze had shrunk to a third of its former size after wells were drilled nearby to capture methane. The crater is a reminder that the Karakum sits on significant oil and natural gas deposits, and that the gas beneath the sand is as much a part of its geography as the dunes on top.
The Dry Uzboy and the Karashor Depression
The north-western Karakum holds the desert’s strangest feature: a river with no water. The Uzboy was a distributary of the Amu Darya that flowed some 750 km from the river through Sarykamysh Lake to the Caspian Sea. Herodotus described it as a branch of the Oxus. A farming civilisation lined its banks from at least the 5th century BC until the 17th century AD, when the water abruptly stopped and the Turkmen tribes living there scattered, many becoming nomads. Its dry bed still loops around the Karashor Depression and past the Greater and Lesser Balkan ranges towards the Caspian. The Great Balkhan Range reaches 1,880 m at Mount Arlan, and in the Uly Balkan archaeologists have found Stone Age human remains.
The Karashor Depression is now the site of Turkmenistan’s most ambitious water project, Golden Age Lake (Altyn Asyr köli). When complete it is planned to cover 2,000 km², reach 70 m deep and hold more than 130 km³ of drainage water from cotton fields. Two collectors feed it: the 720 km Great Turkmen Collector from Lebap Province, and the 432 km Dashoguz Collector, about half of which follows the old Uzboy bed. Filling could take 15 years. Critics warn that much of the water will evaporate, that it will carry pesticides and fertilisers, and that pressure on the Amu Darya could strain relations with Uzbekistan.
Crossing the Karakum from Türkmenabat to the Uzboy therefore means passing from a living river, through canal oases and Bronze Age ruins, to sand that once was a river valley. For the canal’s own story and its cost to the north, see our guide to the Karakum Canal and the history of the Aral Sea, and for the country as a whole, the Turkmenistan country guide fills in the mountains and coast that frame the desert.