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A long, brilliantly blue lake on the Ladakh plateau, with no outlet to the sea.

Pangong Tso lies at about 4,350 m in a tectonic trough on the cold, arid Ladakh plateau. It is endorheic — water flows in but never out — so despite its Himalayan setting it is brackish and freezes solid in winter.

Its intense colours come from the clear high-altitude air and mineral-rich water, and its shores preserve old strandlines marking wetter, higher lake levels in the recent geological past.

Sources

• Geological Survey of India

A short reference note: this summary draws on third-party sources such as the Geological Survey of India and Wikipedia. In time I plan to give every geological feature its own learning-oriented write-up — with custom diagrams, graphs, and study pointers — as I’ve already done for the 11 locations that have an Instagram reel.