Research progress in China's Lop Nur

China's Lop Nut is one of the world's largest playas, and is located in the driest part of Central Asia. Scientific explorations by Chinese and foreign researchers have been continuously conducted there since the mid- to late 1800 s, and much progress has been made, but many issues remain hotly debated. Particularly intense debate focuses on the formation, environmental evolution, drying date of the Lop Nur lake, and cause of the helical salt crusts recently revealed by remote-sensing images. In this paper, we review the status of this research to provide insights that can inform studies in other arid zones that resemble the Lop Nur. The Lop Nur depression is a secondary unit of the Tarim Block, controlled by faults and fractures formed by the Himalayan orogeny, but various competing explanations have been proposed for how these geological structures gave rise to the depression. The depression's formation date also remains unclear. Several boreholes have been created to reconstruct the environmental evolution at different time scales since the Quaternary, and deposition rates of lake sediments, especially since the Late Pleistocene, have averaged less than 1 mm annually. The drying date of the Lop Nur lake is also debated. The helical salt crust structures appear to have formed as the lake shrank, but how and when they formed is unclear. Huge potash reserves have been found, and large-scale potash fertilizer production has begun, but the origin of these deposits is debated. Understanding the factors causing environmental evolution in this region is a central issue that will help us to clarify these and other debated issues. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.