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The Lop Nur is a dried-up salt lake lying in the eastern part of the Tarim Basin in China. The peculiar ear-shaped stripes in Lop Nur observed in satellite images have attracted the interest of investigators. It is believed that these stripes represent former lake shorelines, thus are valuable for studying the lake evolution. Owing to insufficient high-precision elevation data, the elevation along a given stripe was supposed to be constant. In this study, elevation data collected by the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) and the Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) were carefully analysed. The combined topographic data for the ear-shaped region indicate that the elevations of the south shorelines are approximately 1 m higher than the north shorelines along the same stripe. We analyse the mechanisms of the phenomenon and suggest that the wind-driven water surface tilt at the time the ear-shaped stripes formed is the dominant one. The stripe profiles simulated by this mechanism show an excellent agreement with the measured stripe profiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]