Lake Kopa
From Kazakhstan Encyclopedia
Kopa Lake (Template:Lang-kk) is a lake in the town of Kokshetau, located in the Akmola Region of Kazakhstan.
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Location and description
The area where the lake now stands was once swampland. Military authorities ordered a canal be dug, and water from the Chaglinka River was redirected to the area, turning the swamp into the Lake Kopa as it is known today.
Located near the foot of the Kokchetav Massif, and near the north-western part of the city of Kokshetau, the lake has an area of 14 km2 and an average depth of 2.0-3.0 m. Most of the total catchment area of 3,860 km2, is accounted for by the tributaries of the lake: the Chaglinka river to the southwest, and the Kylshakty river to southeast. Only a very small part, 80 km2, comes from the lake itself.
The south and west sides of the lake are separated from the adjacent beaches by depressed areas, and along the southern and eastern coasts are sand and pebble beaches. The northern and eastern shores of the lake are low, flat, and overgrown with vegetation, meaning that the water surface of the lake is basically open only along the western and northern stretches. The lake bottom is viscous, smooth, and covered with a layer of silt clay, loam, and sand, it averages 2 m, but can reach a depth of as much as 6 m in the northern part.
In 1955, the volume of water in the lake was 39.2 million m3, with a surface area of 13.6 km2. From 1955 to 1990 the volume of the lake has decreased by 13 million m3 and now stands at only 26 million m3. The lake sees amplitude fluctuations of between 0.5 and 1.5 m.
The State of the lake
The general sanitary condition of the lake is gradually deteriorating. In 1974, work was begun to clean sediment from Lake Kopa, which continued intermittently until 1993. In total, approximately 400 thousand m3 of sand and gravel were removed from the lake.
Currently, the government conducts routine laboratory tests of the water quality of Lake Copa. Laboratory monitoring is carried out at four control points on physical, chemical, and microbiological properties. According to the service Kazhydromet, the composition of the lake waters on the pollution index corresponds to "moderately polluted".
See also
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