Geography of Belarus
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This article describes the geography of Belarus.
- Location
- Eastern Europe, east of Poland
- Geographic coordinates
- Template:Coor d
- Map references
- Commonwealth of Independent States
- Area
-
- Total: 207,600 kmē
- Land: 207,600 kmē
- Water:
- Area comparative
-
- Australia comparative: slightly smaller than Victoria
- Canada comparative: half the size of Newfoundland and Labrador
- Europe comparative: 13th place, slightly smaller than the United Kingdom and Romania
- United States comparative: slightly smaller than Kansas
- Land boundaries
- Coastline
- 0 km (landlocked)
- Maritime claims
- None (landlocked)
- Climate
- Transitional between continental and maritime; cold winters (average January temperatures are in the range −8 °C to −2 °C), cool and moist summers (average temperature 15 °C to 20 °C).
- Terrain
- Generally flat, containing much marshland
- Elevation extremes
-
- Lowest point: Nyoman River 90 m
- Highest point: Dzyarzhynskaya Hara 345 m
- Natural resources
- Forests, peat deposits, small quantities of oil and natural gas, granite, dolomitic limestone, marl, chalk, sand, gravel, clay
- Land use
-
- Arable land: 29%
- Permanent crops: 1%
- Permanent pastures: 15%
- Forests and woodland: 34%
- Other: 21% (1993 est.)
- Irrigated land
- 1,150 kmē (1998 est.)
- Water resources
- About 20,000 rivers and streams, with the total length of 91,000 km, and about 11,000 lakes, including 470 lakes with the area exceeding 0.5 kmē each. Naroch is the largest lake (79.2 kmē, the deepest point about 25 m). Significant amounts of swampy area, notably in the Polesie region.
- Natural hazards
- NA
- Environment - current issues
-
- Soil pollution from pesticide use.
- South-Eastern part of the country contaminated with fallout from 1986 nuclear reactor accident at Chornobyl, Ukraine, receiving about 60% of total fallout. Vast amounts of territory in Homyel and Mahilyow voblasts rendered uninhabitable. Roughly 7,000 kmē (2,700 mi²) of soil were contaminated by caesium-137 to levels greater than 15 curies (550 gigabecquerels) per square kilometer, i.e., taken from human usage for indefinite time. In 1996 the areas contaminated with over 1 Ci/kmē (37 GBq/kmē) of caesium-137 constituted about 21% of the total territory (only 1% decrease compared to 1986), and in 2002 over 1.5 mln people still lived in this area.
- Environment - international agreements
-
- Party to treaties: Air Pollution, Air Pollution-Nitrogen Oxides, Air Pollution-Sulphur 85, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, Hazardous Wastes, Marine Dumping, Nuclear Test Ban, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Wetlands
- Signed, but not ratified: Law of the Sea
- Geography - note
- Landlocked
Reference
Much of the material in this article is adapted from the CIA World Factbook 2000 and 2003.
External links
- Chernobyl data for Belarus (http://www.chernobyl.info/files/doc/TabE_Minsk.pdf)