Garabogazköl

Garabogazköl - darkometer rating : 5 - One of the most forlorn places on Earth. Even by Turkmenistan ’s standards it's way off the beaten track – in the empty north-western-most corner of the country, east of the coastline of the Caspian Sea, just south of the border with Kazakhstan . Garabogazköl is a salt lagoon, at ca. 7000 square miles or 11,265 km 2 it's in fact the world's largest such lagoon. It is also one of the saltiest bodies of water on Earth, even beating the much smaller but more famously super-briny Dead Sea . And it's at least as deadly an environment. Corpses of dead animals that dared to get too close to Garabogazköl are allegedly a common sight along the lagoon's shores. There is a narrow water inlet from the Caspian Sea, roughly one-third up the narrow ridge of land that separates the two bodies of water. In the 1980s this was closed off owing to concerns that too much water was flowing out of the diminishing Caspian. Thus Garabogazköl temporarily became a proper salt lake . But then this lake itself began to dry out dramatically, until it was practically just a gigantic salt pan (cf. Uyuni ). This caused additional environmental problems from salt dust being blown over the lands and polluting the surrounding landscape (similar to the much worse environmental disaster of the Aral Sea ). So the barrier was breached again in the early 1990s and water has reclaimed the depression since. But it's still very shallow and extremely salty. Salt has long been mined here too, today especially at Garabogaz (formerly called Bekdash), just north of the ridge separating Garabogazköl from the Caspian. Here minerals such as sodium sulphate are mined. But a bit further away from the actual lagoon near Guwlymayak to the south nearer the Caspian coast salt of the edible variety is mined as well.