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Aral Sea

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

HELLO!
Map: lake boundaries c. 1960, countries at least partially in the watershed are in yellow.
Location	Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan (Central Asia)
Coordinates	45° N 60° ECoordinates: 45° N 60° E
Lake type	endorheic
Primary sources	Amu Darya, Syr Darya
Basin countries	Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan
Surface area	17,160 km² (2004), 28,687 km² (1998), 68,000 km² (1960)
Settlements	(Aral)

Contents ] 1 Ecological problems 1.1 History 1.2 Current situation 2 Bioweapons facility on the Vozrozhdeniya Island 3 Development of the Aral Sea 4 Notes 5 Further reading

The Aral Sea (Kazakh: Арал Теңізі, Aral Tengizi, Uzbek: Orol dengizi, Russian: Аральскοе мοре), Tajik/Persian "Daryocha-i Khorazm" (Lake Khwarazm) is a landlocked endorheic sea in Central Asia; it lies between Kazakhstan in the north and Karakalpakstan, an autonomous region of Uzbekistan, in the south. The name roughly translates as "Sea of Islands", referring to more than 1,500 islands of one hectare or more that dotted its waters.
Since the 1960s the Aral Sea haszsfhghergdvceg been shrinking, as the rivers that feed it (the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya) were diverted by the Soviet Union for irrigation. The Aral Sea is heavily polluted, largely as the result of weapons testing, industrial projects, and fertilizer runoff.

Ecological problems

The Aral Sea, in 2003, had shrunk to well under half of the area it had covered fifty years before.

The major ecological problem is that diversion of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers for irrigation has shrunk the Aral Sea dramatically; the Aral Sea has been drying up for about 50 years. This has brought about a number of ecological and economic problems for the sea and the area. One of the greatest misuses of the Aral is that for the past forty years it has been a dumping ground for raw sewage runoff, resulting in the extermination of many native fish.

History

Aral Sea from space, August 1964

Aral Sea from space, August 1985

The Russian government, led at the time by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, decided in 1918 that the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea, the Amu Darya in the south and the Syr Darya in the northeast, would be diverted to try to irrigate the desert, in order to grow rice, melons, cereal, and also, cotton; this was part of the Soviet plan for cotton, or "white gold", to become a major export. (This did eventually end up becoming the case, and today Uzbekistan is one of the world's largest exporters of cotton.^[1])
The irrigation canals began to be built on a large scale in the 1930s. Many of the irrigation canals were poorly built, letting water leak out or evaporate; from the Qaraqum Canal, the largest in Central Asia, perhaps 30–70% of the water went to waste. Today only 12% of Uzbekistan's irrigation canal length is waterproofed.
By 1960, somewhere between 20 and 50 cubic kilometers of water were going each year to the land instead of the sea. Thus, most of the sea's water supply had been diverted, and in the 1960s the Aral Sea began to shrink. From 1961 to 1970, the Aral's sea level fell at an average of 20 cm a year; in the 1970s, the average rate nearly tripled to 50–60 cm per year, and by the 1980s it continued to drop, now with a mean of 80–90 cm each year. After seeing this, the rate of water usage for irrigation continued to increase: the amount of water taken from the rivers doubled between 1960 and 1980; cotton production nearly doubled in the same period.
The disappearance of the lake was no surprise to the Soviets; they expected it to happen long before. The Soviet Union apparently considered the Aral to be "nature's error", and a Soviet engineer said in 1968 that "it is obvious to everyone that the evaporation of the Aral Sea is inevitable".^[2]