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,
Science and technology in Uzbekistan field of science and gender, 2013 or closest year Source: "UNESCO Science Report: towards 2030" (2015), Table 14.1 Since 2012, Uzbekistan has ceded its lead to Kazakhstan for the number of published scientific articles, according to Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, Science Citation Index Expanded. Even taking population into account, Kazakhstan’s output is now much higher than that of its neighbour, with 36 articles per million inhabitants, compared to 11 for Uzbekistan. The majority of scientific papers focus on physics (35%) and chemistry (21%), a pattern also found in Kazakhstan. Since 2006, the rate of international collaboration has remained steady,