Geography of Kazakhstan the water in Kazakhstan is polluted by industrial effluents, pesticide and fertilizer residue, and, in some places, radioactive elements. The most visible damage has been to the Aral Sea, which as recently as the 1970s was larger than any of the Great Lakes of North America save Lake Superior. The sea began to shrink rapidly when sharply increased irrigation and other demands on the only significant tributaries, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya (the latter reaching the Aral from neighboring Uzbekistan), all but eliminated inflow. During the Soviet Era, Kazakhstan received water from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan,
Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan border Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan border The Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan border is 1,314km (816m) and runs from the tripoint with Kazakhstan to the tripoint with Tajikistan. It is Kyrgyzstan’s longest external boundary. The border starts in the north at the tripoint with Kazakhstan and then creates a ‘finger’ of Uzbek territory wedged between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan; the border traverses the Pskem Mountains, with much of this area being taken up by a series of national parks (Ugam-Chatkal National Park in Uzbekistan and Besh-Aral State Nature Reserve in Kyrgyzstan). The boundary then proceeds in a roughly south-eastwards direction, traversing the Chatkal Range and the Qurama Mountains before