Lake Manitoba unique; world's largest growing freshwater lake

Andem

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Mar 24, 2002
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Lake Manitoba is all but unique among the planet's 40 largest lakes in that it's growing larger. In other parts of the world, large lakes are shrinking in what amounts to one of the planet's most horrific environmental disasters.




In central Africa, freshwater Lake Chad has shrunk 95 per cent in 50 years due to increasing irrigation and drinking-water demands along its former shores. Farmers and fishermen in four African countries -- Chad, Niger, Cameroon and Niger -- are now fighting over what little water remains in what was once the world's sixth-largest lake.

In central Asia, the Aral Sea has gone from being the world's fourth-largest freshwater lake to a series of small, brackish basins in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, thanks to decades of disastrous Soviet irrigation policies. Dust storms laden with toxic chemicals stirred up from the exposed former lake bottom now blow over abandoned communities.mong the world's largest bodies of water, Lake Manitoba is a special place.



But the reasons won't please flooded-out farmers or the owners of lakefront homes either ruined this week by storm-driven waves -- or doomed to a similar fate in the coming months and years.

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