Journal Review:
A tale of two seas Ben and Ria
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c e a n o g r a p h e r Professor Tom Rippeth has dedicated his academic life to the study and conservation of our oceans, and his excellent work has inspired this review. In his presentation, Professor Rippeth focuses on two recent environmental disasters involving our oceans – the Aral Sea (or rather lack of) and the retreating Arctic ice sheets. Both of these crises have certainly been exacerbated, if not caused, by human activity in recent years,
and will continue to deteriorate in the future, if no significant actions are taken. Located on the Border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Aral Sea was once the fourth largest inland sea worldwide, spanning 68,000 km2, but since 1960, has seen a 60% reduction in surface area and an 80% reduction in volume. The Aral drainage basin encompasses nine countries, thus contains hundreds of significant tributaries,
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notably the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, which carry snow melt from mountainous areas. These tributaries previously balanced natural rates of evaporation and maintained a healthy water level but recently, unregulated and inefficient human interference has caused this fragile equilibrium to shift. In order to cope with an increasing population in the region, many of these tributaries have been diverted away from the Aral Sea and towards settlements where the water has agricultural,
