Lake Koshkar-Ata

Lake Koshkar-Ata is a roughly 50-square-kilometer depression about 5 kilometers from Aktau and 8 kilometers from the Caspian shore in Mangystau Region. It did not exist as a lake in its current form before the 1960s, when it was created as a dumping ground for radioactive and chemical wastewater from uranium mining and the hydrometallurgical complex built to serve the new city of Shevchenko, now Aktau. Over subsequent decades it also received oil sludge and other industrial waste, leaving its southern portion contaminated with radioactive material and turning it into one of the country's more pressing environmental liabilities rather than a conventional natural lake. Kazakhstan's government has pursued remediation since the late 2010s, including a 2018 plan to plant around 400,000 black saxaul saplings across a 150-hectare green buffer zone roughly 15 kilometers long around the waste site, part of a longer-term effort to stabilize and eventually rehabilitate the area.