Orumiyeh Lake Alive Again

TEHRAN (defapress)- Iranian authorities in the Northwestern province of West Azarbaijan announced that Orumiyeh Lake, the largest lake in the Middle East and the third largest saltwater lake on Earth, which had largely shrunk in recent years has revived again.

News ID: 76525

Date: 31 March 2019 - 17:11

"At present, we can say that Orumiyeh Lake has become alive again and it has the best situation in the past five years," Managing-Director of West Azarbaijan's regional water management company Kiomars Daneshjou said on Sunday.

He added the height of water in Orumiyeh Lake has increased 81cm compared with last September and 36cm compared with the same time last year.

Daneshjou said that 50% of the capacity of the Lake is now full of water.

Orumiyeh is located in Northwestern Iran between the provinces of East and West Azerbaijan and near Iran's border with Turkey.

A UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and a Ramsar (an international treaty for the protection of wetlands) site had earlier warned that the lake has shrunk considerably in the past years and could disappear entirely.

Recently, some local officials in Orumiyeh and Tabriz, capitals of Iran's West and East Azerbaijan provinces respectively, had expressed concerns about the environmental disaster due to the shrinkage of the lake, calling on the government to save it to prevent the environmental degradation of the body of water but the recent flash floods across the country, specially in Northern Iran, have saved the beautiful lake.

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