Lake Kaindy: The Sunken Forest Drowned by an Earthquake

High in the Tian Shan mountains of southeastern Kazakhstan, there's a small turquoise lake with a forest growing out of it. Dozens of bare, gray tree trunks rise straight up from the water, like the masts of sunken ships. Below the surface, the same trees continue down into the depths, still standing where they grew. This is Lake Kaindy. It's only about 400 meters long and reaches a depth of nearly 30 meters, tucked into a narrow gorge inside Kolsay Lakes National Park. Its Kazakh name is usually translated as "birch tree lake," but the trees in the water aren't birches. They're Schrenk's spruce, a conifer native to the Tian Shan. The lake is young, and violent in its origins. The standard account traces it to January 1911, when a powerful earthquake, known as the Kebin or Chon-Kemin earthquake, struck the northern Tian Shan. It tore surface ruptures across the region and shook loose landslides and rock avalanches. In the Kaindy gorge, a massive mass of limestone broke away and crashed into the valley. The Kaindy landslide also buried a group of yurts, killing 38 people. The landslide formed a natural dam across the gorge. With the river blocked, water backed up behind it, and the spruce trees on the valley floor were slowly submerged. That's when the strange part began. Normally, dead trees in water rot away. But the water in Lake Kaindy stays cold all year, and the trees were preserved. More than a century later, the drowned spruces still stand upright beneath the surface. The parts above the water have weathered bare and bleached, but below, divers have found bark and even fine branches still intact. Not everyone agrees on when it happened. A 2024 study used tree rings from the drowned spruces to argue that the forest actually died earlier, linking it to the 1889 Chilik earthquake. For now, 1911 remains the most widely cited date, but the debate is open. Kolsay Lakes National Park was established in 2007 to protect this corner of the Tian Shan. Today, visitors bounce up the rough track from Saty to see the trees still standing in the water, where they grew before the gorge was flooded.