water in the chosen summer salty, very shallow or algal water (wet, bright surface; not counted as water) how often there was water there, over 43 summers shorelines of earlier summerswater in 1984–88: plants in summer 2025 bare ground in summer 2025 how often there was water there
Romania’s lakes from orbit · 43 summers, 1984–2026
The lakes that empty, and the lakes that fill with silt
The lake in the link: ↓
For four summers in a row, from 2022 to 2025, the Landsat satellites found no surface water in Balta Amara, a steppe lake near Buzău in south-eastern Romania that usually holds about 7.0 km² of water in summer. In the summer of 2026 the water came back: 5.2 km².
This page redraws, summer by summer, from satellite images, 402 Romanian lakes and reservoirs: the bodies of water on the map larger than half a square kilometre, and the dams in the Global Dam Watch register, wherever the satellite could see them clearly. Most lakes have kept their 1980s water. A few steppe lakes on the Bărăgan, the flat dry plain north-east of Bucharest, empty and fill again. Some dam reservoirs on the rivers, such as Galbeni and Racova, lose their water another way: silt settles, plants grow on it, and the water has not come back.
#Balta Amara, summer by summer
Each summer is one picture: in blue, the water the satellite saw between mid-July and mid-September. The thin lines are the shorelines of earlier summers; the grey shows how often there was water at each spot.
The lake has two basins split by an embankment. It held water in almost every summer up to 2021. From 2022 to 2025 there was no surface water in any summer: the longest run in 43 summers. In 2026, 5.2 km².
#The limans of the Buzău
Balta Amara is not alone. Along the lower Buzău river, a few kilometres apart, lie the limans: lakes dammed by the river’s own silt. The Buzău county prefecture, the central government’s office in the county, calls them, in a 2025 report on the drought, “natural lakes in origin, but subject to human intervention”. The county’s land-use plan lists Amara and Balta Albă among its fish farms, each with an earth dam and a drain sluice.
In the summer of 2024 Jirlău held 2.3 km² of water, about 42% of a usual one of its 43 summers (the middle one by area). Balta Albă held 1.8 km² of open water and as much again of wet, very bright surface: very shallow salty water, wet salt crust or algae. The prefecture’s report gives other measurements for the same year, by a method it does not describe: Jirlău 2.12 km², Balta Albă 3.32, Amara 0, Câineni 0.
#What the prefecture says
The same report offers an explanation. The long drought and irrigation reduced the water, and the Siriu dam upstream tames the Buzău floods that used to fill the limans. Amara and Câineni lost their link to the river after the flood of July 1975, when the Buzău changed its course.
This page did not test those causes; it reports them as the report states them. In colour: where there was water in the summers of 1984–88 but not in most summers of 2021–25, the Sentinel-2 satellite saw plants (green) or bare ground (sand) on 14 August 2025.
#The crov lakes at Ianca
Further east, by the small town of Ianca, the lakes are of another kind: “saline crov lakes”, hollows where the loess soil has settled, according to the management plan of the ROSPA0048 bird protection area. On 28 February 2023 the town council’s papers said: “both lakes are completely dried out”.
The satellite sees them almost empty in every summer from 2022 to 2025. Where the water had been, on 14 August 2025, there was mostly bare ground: 69% at Ianca. In 2026 a little water returned: 1.1 km² by Landsat, 0.4 km² by Sentinel-2. On so shallow a lake the two satellites disagree.
#They have emptied before
Ianca and Plopu also stood almost empty (under a tenth of a usual summer’s water) for three summers in a row, in 2007, 2008 and 2009, then filled again; Balta Amara dried that time for a single summer, in 2009. What is different now is the length: four summers.
On the Bărăgan these lakes have emptied in runs of dry years and filled again afterwards. The prefecture’s report also lists long droughts such as 1899–1907, 1942–1954, 1982–1994 and 2000–2004.
#The green way: silt
Dam reservoirs on rivers lose water by another route. The Galbeni dam on the Siret, near the city of Bacău, was finished in 1983. Bed surveys gathered by Petru Olariu and colleagues at the Siret river basin authority (2014) show how fast: the lake held 39.6 million cubic metres when it opened and 16 million in 1988; after 27 years, 29.6 million cubic metres were silt, 75% of the volume.
The Galbeni reservoir: 6.5 km² of water in the first five clearly seen summers after filling; 2.6 km² in the summers of 2021–25.
#Racova: the lake that turned green
From orbit, the lost water is green: the silt raised the bed, and plants grew on it. On the Bistrița, the Racova reservoir held 8.65 million cubic metres; by 1995 it had 3.19 left, and Olariu’s table lists it as taken out of use in 2011. Of the water of the summers of 1984–88, only 2% was still water in 2021–25; on 30 August 2025, 96% of the lost area was green. Up to 2004 the lake held 1 to 1.7 km² of water each summer; since 2005, in no summer, wet ones included, has it passed 0.3 km².
#The Delta: lakes turning green
In the south of the Danube Delta, by Lake Dranov, four small lakes kept only 11% to 27% of the water of the summers of 1984–88 as open water: Garla Lunga, Vararia, Oaia Mare and Coada Calului.
In the 34 Delta lakes that lost more than a fifth of their open water, 91% of the lost area was green in the Sentinel-2 images of summer 2025. Satellite images cannot show whether water still lies under the plants (floating reed islands, water lilies, reed beds) or ground; so the page says only that the open water has turned green.
#Most lakes have kept their water
It would be wrong to conclude that Romania’s lakes are vanishing. Among lakes that held at least a quarter of a square kilometre of water in the summers of 1984–88, the typical lowland lake still had 89% of that water in most summers of 2021–25 (95 lakes); in the Danube Delta, 90% (109 lakes); in the dam reservoirs finished by 1982, 89% (90 reservoirs).
Techirghiol, a salt lake by the Black Sea, barely moved in 43 summers: 95%. But 19 of the 95 lowland lakes that held at least a quarter of a square kilometre of water in 1984–88 kept less than half, and 12 of those are in the counties of Brăila and Buzău.