Pakistan Geography, Climate & Nature

Pakistan divides into three major geographic areas: the northern highlands; the Indus River plain, with two subdivisions that correspond roughly to the provinces of Pakistani Punjab and Sindh; and the Balochistan plateau in the west. It is the 33rd-largest country by area, bounded by the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman to the south and by India, Afghanistan, Iran and China by land. The Thar desert lies in Sindh against the Indian border; the Indus runs the length of the country from the mountains to the sea and is the reason the plain has fed cities for five thousand years.

The north is the superlative part. Gilgit-Baltistan, which Pakistan administers as a semi-provincial territory within the disputed Kashmir region, is two-thirds glacier, mountain and lake and holds five of the fourteen eight-thousanders, K2 at 8,611 metres among them, and more than fifty peaks above 7,000. The Karakoram Highway runs through it to a maximum of 4,714 metres near the Khunjerab pass, 4,693 metres, on the Chinese border; the Hunza valley floor lies at 2,438 metres under Rakaposhi's 7,788, and the Deosai plateau near Skardu averages 4,114 metres, the second-highest in the world.

Islamabad, the planned capital built along the Margalla Hills in the 1960s and established in 1967, forms a metropolitan area of over 5.7 million with Rawalpindi; Lahore lies on the Punjab plain near the Indian border; Karachi, over 20 million, is on the coast.

Pakistan's climate runs from the hottest plains on earth to the highest cold. On the Indus plain the mean June temperature is 38 degrees and the highest readings exceed 53; the country recorded 53.7 degrees on 28 May 2017, one of the highest temperatures ever measured on the planet, and the dry, hot Loo wind blows across the plains in summer, broken occasionally by dust storms and thunderstorms. The south-west monsoon runs from late June to late September over almost the whole country, excluding western Balochistan, the tribal districts, Chitral and Gilgit-Baltistan, and the Punjab receives abundant rain from it while the coast stays arid.

The north is a different climate at every thousand metres: the Hunza valley at 2,438 metres has an autumn of famous colour, the Deosai plateau at 4,114 is snowbound most of the year and in flower for a few summer weeks, the Khunjerab pass at 4,693 closes in winter, and the eight-thousanders of the Karakoram have their climbing season in July and August. Altitude sickness is a risk that the British advisory names for Gilgit-Baltistan.

Best Destinations by Month has the calendar.

Pakistan's biodiversity is stratified by altitude. The Deosai National Park near Skardu, 843 square kilometres at an average 4,114 metres, was established in 1993 to protect the critically endangered Himalayan brown bear, and is the second-highest plateau in the world; Gilgit-Baltistan around it is two-thirds glacier, mountain and lake, with more than fifty peaks above 7,000 metres and five above 8,000, including K2. Below the mountains the Indus plain is among the most intensively farmed and irrigated landscapes on earth, and the Thar desert in Sindh and the Balochistan plateau are arid.

The encyclopaedia pages opened for this page carry no species inventory beyond the brown bear, and none is invented here. What can be said is structural: a country that runs from sea level to 8,611 metres, from the Arabian Sea's mangroves through desert, irrigated plain and forested hill to glacier, holds every habitat the subcontinent has, most of them under pressure from 241 million people.

No species-level survey was consulted beyond the sources named in the data file.

The Himalayan brown bear of the Deosai plateau is the animal the sources name: critically endangered, the reason the park was created in 1993, and seen by visitors who cross the plateau in the summer weeks it is open. This page says only what its sources say, and beyond the bear they say little; the markhor, snow leopard and ibex of the Karakoram and Hindu Kush appear in no sentence opened for this page and stay out of it, though the park authorities of Gilgit-Baltistan are the people to ask.

The practical wildlife is the advisories': rabies risk, mosquito-borne disease on the plains, and the animals of altitude -- yaks and horses on the Deosai and the Fairy Meadows track, where local drivers alone may take the road. In the Indus delta below Karachi the mangroves are the coast's nursery; on the plains the birds of the irrigation canals are what a traveller will actually see.