There are benches, flattened ridges and tabular masses of consolidated clay (yardangs) that are in a distinctly defined laminae, three stories being sometimes superimposed one upon the other, while their vertical faces are abraded, and often undercut, by the wind.

These indications include salt-stained depressions of a lacustrine appearance; traces of former lacustrine shorelines, more or less parallel and concentric; the presence in places of vast quantities of fresh water mollusc shells (species of Lymnaea and Planorbis); the existence of belts of dead poplars; patches of dead tamarisks and extensive beds of withered reeds, all of these are always on top of the yardangs, never in the wind-etched furrows.

[3] In Hanshu (the Book of Han, a history of China completed in 111), where it was called Puchang Hai (蒲昌海), the lake was suggested to be of a great size, with a dimension of 300 to 400 li, roughly 120–160 km (75–99 mi), in length and breadth.

[6] It was also called Yan Ze (鹽澤) in Shiji, which means "salt marsh", indicating that the lake was salty.

It had shifted its location to Kara-Koshun by the latter half of the nineteenth century, then back again to Lop Nur in 1921 through human intervention.

The building of dams by Chinese garrisons in the twentieth century blocked the water from the rivers feeding in to Lop Nur and it is now primarily salt flats.

A scientific expedition to the Lop Nur region in 1979-1982 collected only 36 species of plants, belonging to 13 families (mainly Chenopodiaceae and Compositae) and 26 genera.

The desert itself is abraded, filed, eroded and carried bodily away into the network of lakes in which the Tarim River wanders.

The sand also blows across the lower, constantly shifting waterways of the Tarim River and deposits itself onto gigantic dunes that choke the eastern end of the Taklamakan Desert.