SHRINKING LAKE has receded 100 kilometers from this former shoreline near Moynak, Uzbekistan.
Image: Matthieu Paley
In Brief
- The Aral Sea in Central Asia was the fourth-largest lake on the planet in 1960. By 2007 it had shrunk to 10 percent of its original size. Widespread, wasteful irrigation of the deserts along the Amu and Syr rivers, which feed the Aral, cut the freshwater inflow to a trickle.
- The sea has shriveled into three major residual lakes, two of which are so salty that fish have disappeared. The once thriving fishing fleets have disappeared, too. Former shore towns have collapsed. Vast seabeds lie exposed and dried; winds now blow salts and toxic substances across populated areas, causing significant health problems.
- Nevertheless, a dam built in 2005 has helped the northernmost lake expand quickly and drop substantially in salinity. Fish populations and wetlands are returning—and with them signs of economic revival. The two big southern lakes could become dead seas, however, unless the Amu river, which once fed them, is substantially reengineered, a project requiring tens of billions of dollars and difficult political agreements.
- Other lakes worldwide are beginning to suffer similar fates, chief among them Lake Chad in Central Africa and the Salton Sea in Southern California. Lessons learned about the Aral’s demise and partial resurrection could benefit these regions.
The Aral Sea gets almost all its water from the Amu and Syr rivers. Over millennia the Amu’s course has drifted away from the sea, causing it to shrink. But the lake always rebounded as the Amu shifted back again. Today heavy irrigation for crops such as cotton and rice siphons off much of the two rivers, severely cutting flow into their deltas and thus into the sea. Evaporation vastly outpaces any rainfall, snowmelt or groundwater supply, reducing water volume and raising salinity.
The Soviet Union hid the sea’s demise for decades until 1985, when leader Mikhail Gorbachev revealed the great environmental and human tragedy. By the late 1980s the sea’s level had dropped so much that the water had separated into two distinct bodies: the Small Aral (north) and the Large Aral (south). By 2007 the south had split into a deep western basin, a shallow eastern basin and a small, isolated gulf. The Large Aral’s volume had dropped from 708 to only 75 cubic kilometers (km3), and salinity had risen from 14 to more than 100 grams per liter (g/l). The 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union divided the lake between newly formed Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, ending a grand Soviet plan to channel in water from distant Siberian rivers and establishing competition for the dwindling resource.
This article was originally published with the title Reclaiming the Aral Sea.
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5 Comments
Add CommentHope to see the Aral Sea continue to enlarge and repopulate lost species
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisiceman
Business idea for oil, gas and coal companies: they could use these areas as coal storage, which compensate burning of fossil fuels. These areas (Lake Aral, Chad, Salton,...) could be vast carbon storages - if we only could supply water to them. Lake Chad could be flooded from south - the big Ubangi-river could be diverted to north with reasonable costs ? Congo-river has vast electricity potential, which could be used to pump Ubangi-waters to Lake Chad area. Also nuclear energy could be used to desalination purposes - about 4 kWh is needed to purify 1 m3 seawater. Russians have used fast reactor BN-350 successfully for this purpose.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHello .During the USSR union comunist state's policy generaly to be stronger from other democratic block and USA. For this goal everything were legal for this empire .This policy's one of the fruit is Aral sea(lake).For more agriculture harvest(especialy coton)gave very damages area's dust and lake's waters(finished)This enviromental catastrophe must be sitimulant for to other all critic ecologic dangerous stiuations.Today media gave a news about artric ice collapse .Responsible goverments,organizations must be careful for scientists and resarcher's stimulants.Generaly (politic,commercial)advanteges are first prefers unfortunately.Climate changes ,harmfuls to rainforests and other ecosystems are earth's one of the biggest common problems.Kyoto protocol still not sign by big countries and not considiration.Our common house planet's lovely Creator is going to be operation acording to Bible ,soon(look :www.watchtower.org)With my best deep regards...John Bardakch.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor all the potential flaws, doesn't this sort of macro-environmental engineering hold some promise?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInstead of building more oil and gas pipelines -- or a few thousand more nuclear warheads -- why not spend a bit to see about, say, the old idea of piping water from Siberia to some deserts?
Study it, of course, but be serious about finding a solution.
Seems like lots of places in the Middle East might benefit from this sort of thing; Australia seems to have plenty of rain in the north, but none in the middle.
Engineers built the Suez and Panama Canals 100+ years ago; there's a huge tunnel under the English Channel, and one through rock just for aluminum manufacturing in Iceland.
So why not put our best engineering and environmental minds to work on pipe - canal systems to create new arable land?
Difficult? You bet? Expensive? Yup?
But tell me again how much we wasted on the U.S. wars in Iraq and Vietnam, and how sucessful those lethal lunacies were.
Betcha the cost of a water pipe around the world would be pocket change compared with that of all our mass-suicide projects.
I'm no expert, so feel free to blast away on environmental imbalance, permeability of sand, evaporation rates and so on. I can't counter a thing, but I bet dedicated scientists and engineers could overcome most obstacles.
I applaud Turkmenistan for at least making a try. Sounds like there was some success too. But they are trying while 'first-world' nations perfect neutron bombs and international financial warfare.
Bill Banks, NY