President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov made a working trip to Balkan province (oblast), where he familiarized himself with the ecological situation in the area of the artificial lake Altyn Asyr (Golden Age) in the Central Karakum Desert. On the trip, the head of state was accompanied by heads of representative offices of international organizations accredited in Ashgabat.
The President of Turkmenistan, talking with diplomats, spoke about the construction of the lake "Altyn Asyr", aimed at solving the problem of disposal of collector-drainage waters, which are the inevitable consequence of irrigated agriculture. If previously such waters were dumped into the Amu Darya and the Kara Kum, flooding pastures, now Turkmenistan, thanks to this project, is the first in the region to refuse this practice.
The idea of the project is to unite the inter-farm and trunk collectors of the country into a single system for collecting and removing collector-drainage water into the giant Garashor (Black salt marsh) natural depression in north-western Turkmenistan. The length of the lake is 103 kilometers, the width is 18.6 kilometers, the average depth is 70 meters, the capacity of the natural bowl is 132 cubic kilometers. The total investment allocated from the state budget for the implementation of this project is more than 550 million US dollars.
The head of state noted the importance of a scientific approach to the development of the Altyn Asyr lake and stressed the need to involve the Academy of Sciences of Turkmenistan in this work.
Source: Turkmenistan.ru