reportage
How people killed a Sea. The history of eco-disaster in central Asia Sound of water and pleasant feel of the wind on the skin. Lots of boats were coming back from fishing. The fish smell was saturating everything in the harbour. People were busy transporting cargo to local canneries. Some people were sunbathing on the beach. It might look like that in the late 1960s in Aralsk or Muynaq in Central Asia. Before the Sea… disappeared. All that was left was the graveyard of rusting ships and an enormous ecological disaster.
T
he Aral Sea lies at the border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in the middle of the deserts Kara-Kum and Kyzyl-Kum. In 1960 this saline sea area was about 68 000 km2; it was the fourth of Earth’s most giant inland water bodies. The economy of the surrounding cities was based on the fish industry. However, Soviet politics had a different plan for this region. They came up with the project of irrigating desert areas to cultivate cotton and crops. The digging of drainage canals started in the 1930s and increased in the 1960s. The water from the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya- two rivers fed the Aral Sea, was diverted into irrigation canals. The plantations were growing, therefore in the late eighties, Uzbekistan became the largest cotton exporter in the world. Water from the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya had been used to water plantations practically for thousand years. But what could go wrong? As we can see today – a lot. Twenty per
14 - VOICES
cent of Aral’s water supply came from rainfalls. The rest was delivered by the Amu Darya and Sur Darya rivers. Most canals were built so poorly that the water from the rivers indeed watered the cotton. Still, it is estimated that ca. 30-75% of the water from the biggest Qaraqum Canal went to waste because of leakage and evaporation. All the water wasted in Qaraqum Canal was lost in Aral, sinking into the soil instead of sourcing the Sea. The water level in the Aral Sea has decreased rapidly since that time. And this is how the tragedy began. Since 1960, the first-decade water level dropped by 21 cm yearly, but in the next desiccation period, it was 57 cm a year. Due to positive feedback between evaporation and the sea surface temperature, the water level started accelerating faster. Due to shrinking, in the late eighties, the Sea receded to form two, then four parts: smaller North Aral Sea, temporary Barsakelmes
Lake and Larger South Aral Sea, which split into western and eastern basins. The salinity of the Sea increased from 10 g/l to more than 100 g/l in Southern Aral, so most of the Sea’s fauna and flora, including endemic species, died out. Water was no longer fit for drinking purposes due to increasing salinity and pollution with pesticides and fertilisers from surrounding farms. In 2014 US space agency’s satellite took pictures showing the dried-up eastern basin of the South Aral Sea, which turned into the AralKum desert, an utterly barren and salty area. Currently, the Aral lake has 10% of its original volume of water and 25% of its original size. Water leakages damaged the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya deltas and vegetation. The hydrological balance in the region was disturbed. The vegetative cover changed, and the plants began to die away. The side effect of this process was
