Kulunda Main Canal
The Kulunda Main Canal is an irrigation canal in Altai Krai, Russian Federation. The canal was built to bring water to the Kulunda Steppe, a region periodically subjected to severe droughts.
Topography
The canal begins close to Kamen-na-Obi and runs first southwards; shortly thereafter it heads in a southeast direction then it bends and runs in a roughly southwest direction. It passes through the Kamensky, Tyumentsevsky, Bayevsky, Blagoveshchensky and Rodinsky districts. The total length of the canal is with a capacity of and two pumping stations. The main pumping station is in Kamen-na-Obi and it pumps the water of the Ob river at an elevation of to the edge of the Ob Plateau at an elevation of. The secondary one is further south in Klyuchi village, Tyumentsevsky District.
The canal ends at the Kuchuk river close to Novotroitsk. A extension reaching Zlatopol was projected, but never carried out.
History
Construction of the canal began in August 1973, at the time of the USSR. The project had been put forward at the beginning of the decade and aimed to irrigate in the area of Novotroitsk, as well as Zlatopol, located further west near the Kazakhstan–Russia border. Besides, it was expected that the canal would also benefit of agricultural fields and around of pastureland in the areas located by the eastern section of the canal.
Current situation
In present times the surfaces watered by the canal have diminished. The canal has become silted in some places with water overflowing its banks in heavy rain, leading to the flooding of inhabited areas. In other stretches its waters are absorbed by the sandy soil, owing to the deterioration of the original watertight coating. The canal crosses areas with various types of soil, including clayey, sandy, loamy, and solonetz soils. A length totaling approximately running through sandy soil sectors was planned to be provided with an anti-filtration polyethylene coating over a thick protective layer of soil. But in the end only a length of canal sections were treated against filtration and the coating has a lifetime of about 30 years, which already ran out by the turn of the millennium. Plans for the maintenance and overhaul of the canal have been put forward, but so far they have not been implemented.
The Kulunda Main Canal runs roughly in a NE/SW direction only to the east of lake Gorkoye, a long salt lake. The building of the canal disrupted the Gorkoye ecosystem by increasing the salinity of the lake and some fish species died out.