Monday, April 19, 2010

So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish

The Aral Sea is just... about...



Gone. Another image of the sea from March 2010:



From the Huffington Post:
The drying up of the Aral Sea is one of the planet's most shocking disasters, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Sunday, as he urged Central Asian leaders to step up efforts to solve the problem.

Once the world's fourth-largest lake, the sea has shrunk by 90 percent since the rivers that feed it were largely diverted in a Soviet project to boost cotton production in the arid region.

The shrunken sea has ruined the once-robust fishing economy and left fishing trawlers stranded in sandy wastelands, leaning over as if they dropped from the air. The sea's evaporation has left layers of highly salted sand, which winds can carry as far away as Scandinavia and Japan, and which plague local people with health troubles.
The story of the Aral Sea is the sort of thing you want to point to when people argue that technology and human ingenuity will save us from our own self-inflicted crises. The Shrinkage started with the Soviet Union's plan to divert the Amu Darya and Syr Darya to grow a bunch of cotton in the middle of the desert. Hilariously, the Soviets knew the Sea would vanish as a result of this plan - but they did it anyway:
''It was part of the five-year plans, approved by the council of ministers and the Politburo,'' said Aleksandr Asarin, an expert at the Russian State Hydroproject Institute who angered his bosses by predicting, in 1964, that the sea was headed for catastrophe. ''Nobody on a lower level would dare to say a word contradicting those plans,'' he said, ''even if it was the fate of the Aral Sea.''
Apparently Kazakhstan is working to revive what is now the North Aral Sea with some success. There's less hope for the southern sliver of the sea that remains. The water, already so salty as to have been rendered lifeless, continue to recede from the stranded fishing villages and rusting husks of Soviet-era fishing boats that used to subsist on the sea's bounty.

60 comments:

K H D and sometimes T said...

While the whole shebang started off with a bit of environmental consciousness Stalin largely steered things towards the "nature is a beast to be tamed and a resource to be exploited at all costs" mentality. The Aral sea is just the most visible (from space!) and easily graspable remnant in a region dotted with environmental tragedies.

I bet a person could float like crazy in that salty water.

neil said...

I visited the old shoreline from the Uzbek side in 2008: http://www.flickr.com/photos/neilbanas/3312451715/ . My guide, from a town several hours away, told me that in her lifetime the weather in summer has changed by thirty degrees with the sea gone. The old cotton fields we passed on the way have gotten so saline that there's two sets of canals through them: one to supply water, one to carry the water that flows off them away as waste.

Dohsan said...

Technology and human ingenuity won't save us. Property rights and good old fashioned selfishness will. The Aral Sea tragedy is what happens when you mix socialism (real socialism, not what the Repubs call "socialist", which is just everything they oppose) with authoritorianism. The one-child policy will produce another tragedy in our lifetimes, just you wait and see.

Chachy said...

KHDT/Richard - It is stark because it's so visible and concentrated, that's true. I wonder if you added up all the parking lots in the US, for instance, how much land surface they would consume. As much as the Aral Sea? I don't know. At any rate, all that pavement has amounted just as surely to the obliteration of whatever existed before the bulldozers came through.

I'm no big fan of the Soviet approach to environmental management. But color me skeptical that "old-fashioned selfishness" is the best way to address environmental problems. (Unless you mean, e.g., levying a hefty carbon tax to promote more sustainable behavior...)

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Thank you for another essential article. The Aral sea is just the most visible (from space!) and easily graspable remnant in a region dotted with environmental tragedies.

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The sea's evaporation has left layers of highly salted sand, which winds can carry as far away as Scandinavia and Japan, and which plague local people with health troubles.

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