The Cottbuser Ostsee (Cottbus Eastern Lake; dsb, Chóśebuski pódzajtšny jazor) is an

artificial lake A reservoir (; from French ''réservoir'' ) is an enlarged lake behind a dam. Such a dam may be either artificial, built to store fresh water or it may be a natural formation. Reservoirs can be created in a number of ways, including control ...

under development on the grounds of the former

open-pit Open-pit mining, also known as open-cast or open-cut mining and in larger contexts mega-mining, is a surface mining technique of extracting rock or minerals from the earth from an open-air pit, sometimes known as a borrow. This form of mining ...

lignite mine :de:Tagebau Cottbus Nord near

Cottbus Cottbus (; Lower Sorbian: ''Chóśebuz'' ; Polish: Chociebuż) is a university city and the second-largest city in Brandenburg, Germany. Situated around southeast of Berlin, on the River Spree, Cottbus is also a major railway junction with exte ...

Brandenburg Brandenburg (; nds, Brannenborg; dsb, Bramborska ) is a state in the northeast of Germany bordering the states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Saxony, as well as the country of Poland. With an area of 29,480 square ...

, Germany.

Dimensions

When complete, it is to cover a surface area of , making it one of the biggest artificial lakes in the country. At a maximum depth of and an average depth of between and the lake is to have a total water volume of once flooding is complete. Until the lake is complete, the biggest artificial lake in Germany by surface area (likewise created by conversion of a former lignite mine) is Geiseltalsee which covers some . However, the water volume of Geiseltalsee is almost three times larger at . For comparison, Germany's largest lake,

Lake Constance Lake Constance (german: Bodensee, ) refers to three bodies of water on the Rhine at the northern foot of the Alps: Upper Lake Constance (''Obersee''), Lower Lake Constance (''Untersee''), and a connecting stretch of the Rhine, called the Lak ...

, covers at a depth of up to and contains some of water. The largest

reservoir A reservoir (; from French ''réservoir'' ) is an enlarged lake behind a dam. Such a dam may be either artificial, built to store fresh water or it may be a natural formation. Reservoirs can be created in a number of ways, including control ...

(i.e. an artificial lake created via a dam) in Germany by surface area is Forggensee in Bavaria with a surface area of and a maximum water volume of . However, this lake is reduced to a "rump" of surface area in winter.

History

The lake covers what used to be the open pit lignite mine "Tagebau Cotbus Nord" which produced a total of of coal during its operation from 1981 to 2015. The last coal was mined in December 2015 and subsequently work began on converting the mine into a lake. Flooding started in 2019 but had to be interrupted several times due to low water levels in the nearby

Spree River Spree may refer to: Geography * Spree (river) The Spree ( ; wen, Sprjewja, cs, Spréva) is, with a length of approximately , the main tributary of the River Havel. The Spree is much longer than the Havel, which it flows into at Berlin-Spanda ...

. The lake is to become part of the

Lusatian Lake District The Lusatian Lake District (german: Lausitzer Seenland, dsb, Łužyska jazorina, hsb, Łužiska jězorina) is a chain of artificial lakes under construction in Germany across the north-eastern part of Saxony and the southern part of Brandenburg ...

, a chain of artificial lakes mostly the result of open-pit lignite mining.

Name

The name - besides referring to the location of the lake to the East of central Cottbus - can be interpreted as a pun on the German name for the

Baltic Sea The Baltic Sea is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that is enclosed by Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Sweden and the North and Central European Plain. The sea stretches from 53°N to 66°N latitude and fr ...

, which is called "Ostsee" in German, the two words only being distinguished by their

grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns ...

: "See" meaning "sea" in German is grammatically female, whereas "See" meaning "lake" in German is grammatically male.

References

Buildings and structures in Spree-Neiße Artificial lakes of Germany {{Lake-stub