Aral Sea Discover Magazine
Return of the Aral Sea
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/sep/returnaralsea
Discover Magazine
September 2006
The desiccation of a remote inland
lake in Central Asia is one of the world's worst ecological disasters. Now,
with an $85 million engineering project, the doomed sea is coming back to life.
Ecologist Maira Nurkisheva is driving over what was once the northern shore
of the Aral Sea, a vast inland lake straddling the border between Kazakhstan
and Uzbekistan. Rusting abandoned ships dot the sandy seabed. Some have been
scavenged for scrap metal; the others provide shade for irritable herds of
Bactrian camels. There are few other signs of life. When we reach the nearby
village of Birlistik, which used to overlook a bay on the sea, we see that its
mud-walled huts now face an insecticide-laced desert, filled with tumbleweeds
and toxic shrubs, that stretches as far as the eye can see. Yet the villagers
all speak enthusiastically of the boget, or dam, that is part of the
grand waterworks project for which Nurkisheva is a consultant. Fifteen-year-old
Parxhat Kutmanbetov explains in Kazakh, and Nurkisheva translates: "I've
never seen the sea. But now I am sure the sea is coming back."
If all goes as planned, within a few years the Aral Sea could creep back to
within three miles of the village. Revival of the shrunken sea hinges on an $85
million renovation of Kazakhstan's dilapidated system of river canals, sluices,
and channels, culminating in an eight-mile dam across the middle of the
northern part of the sea. The effort, a collaboration between the World Bank
and the oil-rich Kazakh government, aims to reverse the decades of desiccation
that have shriveled one of the world's biggest inland bodies of water.
Bream dry at a
fishery center sponsored by Aral Tenizi, a Danish organization.
Four decades ago, the Aral Sea offered a constant supply of fish. Two dozen
species thrived in its waters, including caviar-rich sturgeon, pike perch, and
silver carp, known locally as fat tongue. The sea spread over more than 26,000
square miles, and ships could travel 250 miles from the northern port of
Aralsk, in Kazakhstan, to the southern harbor of Muynak in Uzbekistan. But
Soviet-sponsored irrigation projects, begun in the 1950s, diverted water from
two rivers that fed the sea: the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. By the late '90s,
the Aral Sea was known as the world's fastest-disappearing body of water.
It had then shrunk by more than half and lost nearly three-fourths of its
volume.
Now, after decades of grim losses, the news from the Aral Sea is good:
Since the dam's completion last August, the smaller, northern part of the Aral
Sea has swelled by 30 percent, flooding more than 300 square miles of parched,
sun-bleached seabed.
For thousands of years, people have lived in the Aral Sea basin, which
served as an oasis on the Silk Road, the trading route that linked China to
Europe. "Three thousand years ago, this was an agricultural region,"
says Philip Micklin, an Aral Sea expert and geographer emeritus from Western
Michigan University. "You'd have seen wooden irrigation canals all along
the Amu Darya." Even in 1558, Anthony Jenkinson, an envoy for Queen
Elizabeth I, foresaw trouble: "In short time all that land is like to be
destroyed, and to become a wilderness for want of water."
Soviet planners in the 1950s diverted much of the rivers' flow to water
fields of rice and cotton in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and in farther-flung
Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. The irrigation system was so leaky that many
canals lost more than 50 percent of the diverted river water en route to the
fields, which cut the amount flowing into the sea. By the 1970s, everyone could
see that something had gone terribly wrong. "The sea was dying in front of
my eyes," remembers fishery director Agilbek Aimbetov. "We survived
on enthusiasm alone," he says, using a popular Soviet-era euphemism for
working for little or no pay.
Not only was the sea drying up, it was growing lethally salty. Like the
Great Salt Lake in Utah, the Aral Sea has no naturally occurring outlets and
over time collects salt from river deposits. With less water flowing in, the
process accelerated. By the late 1980s, 10,424 square miles of seafloor had
become desert and was layered with toxic salts. Water salinity had risen from
10 grams per liter in the 1950s, when the sea was healthy, to about 26 grams
per liter in 1990. (At 35 grams per liter, it would be as salty as the ocean.)
All 24 species of fish disappeared. The water "wasn't quite salt paste
yet, but nothing could survive in it," says Masood Ahmad of the World
Bank, who was project leader for the massive undertaking in Kazakhstan.
"No biological life was possible."
The effects rippled throughout the region. Without this source of food or
water, only a few dozen of the 180 known native land-animal species survived
the desiccation. When the fishing industry collapsed in the 1980s, thousands of
locals fled their villages to search for a new life in larger cities. Those
remaining behind eked out an existence on the land. Tuberculosis reached
epidemic proportions, and infant mortality rates quadrupled, with acute
respiratory diseases accounting for 50 percent of the deaths. Potable water
became scarce throughout the area, and even breathing the air was risky.
Chemical runoff from agricultural fields simply dried on the seafloor and was
ferried back into towns with the first winds.
By 1990 the shrinking waters had separated into two parts—the northern
"Small Sea" in Kazakhstan and the southern "Large Sea" in
neighboring Uzbekistan. As the seas evaporated, hard-packed sand replaced water
around the hundreds of islands that had dotted the sea and had provided a haven
for wildlife. When the waters vanished around Vozrozhdeniya Island, a Soviet
germ-warfare facility for open-air testing of anthrax, plague, and smallpox in
the southern Aral Sea, U.S. officials in 2000 became so worried that they sent
funds and experts to clean up buried stockpiles of the remaining lethal
bacteria. In 2002 the U.N. estimated that winds carried 200,000 tons of salt
and toxic sand each day throughout the Aral Sea region and thousands of miles
beyond, sometimes reaching as far as Russia's Arctic north—a problem that still
continues.
"Everything is polluted with herbicides, metals, and salt," says
the Aralsk regional hospital's head doctor, Arginbau Asanbaev. Experts believe
the ecological disaster has displaced more than 100,000 people and affected the
health of more than 5 million people throughout the region.
Plans to save the sea abounded; "assessment fatigued" locals
joked that if each visiting scientist had brought a bucket of water, the sea
would be filled. The Soviets dreamed up a $40 billion scheme to divert rivers
flowing into the Arctic Sea into the Aral instead, but the plan was shelved for
lack of cash. After the Soviet Union collapsed, desperate Kazakh villagers
built a primitive dam out of sand to keep the water that trickled into the
northern sea from draining away into the southern portion. The dam washed away
in the late '90s.
After years of failed initiatives, bureaucratic negligence, and post-Soviet
squabbling among former republics, there is now real hope for the Aral Sea. The
effort by the World Bank and the Kazakh government, begun in 2001, has
reconstructed nearly 60 miles of canals, sluices, and waterworks, dramatically
improving water distribution in Kazakhstan. The river flow now efficiently
irrigates fields along the banks of the Syr Darya and runs into and rejuvenates
the dried-up Aral Sea.
|
Near the dam a young Kazakh shows off one of
dozens of carp he has caught by midmorning. |
