The Aral Sea was once the fourth largest lake in the world. Its name translates to Sea of Islands, thanks to the 1,100 islands it used to have. In less than 50 years, however, humanity has shrunk it to 10% of its original size, transforming it into a toxic, dusty wasteland- the Aralkum Desert.
The left image is the Aral Sea in 1989, the right image is the Aral Sea in 2014. [Image source]
In 1950 the government of the Soviet Union instituted a program to achieve "cotton independence". Part of this program involved improved cultivation techniques and aggressively increased fertilizer and pesticide use, but the most important part was the diversion of water away from the Aral Sea. Starting in 1960, over six hundred dams were created to help divert water away from the Aral Sea and to farmland for cotton. Thousands of miles of new canals were constructed as well. The cotton growing plan did work- at one point in the 80s the area of the Soviet Union that is now Uzbekistan was the world's leading producer of cotton, and it's still one of the world's top five cotton producers. The Aral Sea rapidly began to shrink.
Over the next 40 years, over 60,000 square kilometers of water dried up. In places, it got over 40 meters deep. Once thriving fishing villages now sit in the middle of dusty wastelands, docks overlooking a waterless plain as far as the eye can see. Hundreds of immense wrecked industrial fishing boats lie on their sides, scattered across the land like the toys of a mad child god. The Aral Sea at one point provided one sixth of all the fish consumed in the USSR- but in the 1970s, the fish all died. As the lake dried up, the climate began to change as well. The rain stopped, so the inhabitants could no longer grow crops. The goats and cattle that they raised grew thin and stringy, and their milk is low in fat and bitter. The frequent dust storms meant that the summers got hotter and the winters got colder.
An area that was once waterfront overlooks the former seabed of the Aral Sea. [Image source]
What little remained of the sea was extremely saline (over 10 times the salinity it had before the cotton program began) and loaded with toxins. The exposed basin is a nightmare that makes the Salton Sea look like nothing to worry about. Along with a comparable amount of salt, the Soviet cotton industry loaded even more fertilizers and pesticides onto their land, making the Aralkum desert dust that much more toxic. That's just the tip of the iceberg, however- there's also massive amounts of heavy metals and other industrial contaminants, thanks to the Soviet Union's much lower environmental standards than America's. (Thanks largely to them trying to cast environmental ills as resulting from capitalism, and so having to cover it up when it happened to them to save face.) As if that weren't enough, the dust is also radioactive from frequent nearby nuclear weapons tests. There was also a major bioweapons lab on Vozrozhdeniya (Rebirth) Island, and a number of anthrax burial sites there weren't even decontaminated until 2002.
As a result of the horribly polluted dust of the Aralkum Desert, health issues in the region are horrific. The infant morality rate in the region is 75 in every 1,000 births. (Compared to 30 out of every 1,000 globally.) Over 10% of children that live directly by the Aralkum Desert die in the first year of life. Respiratory issues like asthma, drug resistant tuberculosis, and more are more common than not. Cancer rates are ten times higher than they were in the 1960s. The average lifespan of residents has dropped by 14 years, from 65 to 51.
An orphaned ship in the Aralkum Desert. [Image source]
As if this all wasn't bad enough, the dust gets spread by monstrous dust storms, as this region lies right under a major east to west air current. The toxic dust storms are huge in size, and darken the sky and reduce visibility so much that they're often referred to as black blizzards. They can last for days at a time, and shake buildings with their force. They have spread the health problems of the areas immediately around the dried up sea a significant distance- pesticides from the Aralkum dust has been found in Greenland glaciers, Norwegian forests, and even in the blood of penguins in Antarctica. The dust storms also significantly alter the weather, as noted earlier. The storms do most of their damage to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, being the immediate neighbors of the lake, but have also heavily hit Turkmenistan and other central Asian nations. The salt that makes up a significant percentage of the dust coats the land, contributing to growing water shortages. All told, over 100 million tons of the toxic dust gets blown out of the Aralkum Desert every year.
A huge difference, however, can be seen in the two countries bordering the former Aral- Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Kazakhstan still has part of its lake left- the eastern and northern parts are the last that have water, and are mostly encompassed in Kazakstani territory. Of the two rivers that once fed the Aral Sea, the Amu Darya river, in Uzbekistani territory, is completely used up by the time it reaches the basin- no water is allowed to escape the thirsty cotton industry. The Syr Darya river of Kazakhstan, however, is allowed to freely (if somewhat reduced in volume) reach the northern part of the lake. Even more importantly, however, was the World Bank financed construction of the Kokaral Dam, which covers the 8 mile strait that separated the North Aral Sea (also known as the Small Aral Sea) from the South Aral Sea (also known as the Large Aral Sea). Kazakhstan has actually managed to preserve a small section of the sea.
A 2008 Aral Sea dust storm as seen from space. [Image source]
The Kokaral dam is a strange sight- eight miles long and two stories tall, its sluice gates continually pour water out onto the dry, cracked desert, where it swiftly soaks into the dirt or evaporates. Since its completion in 2005, it's served to protect the North Aral Sea from going the way of most of the South Aral Sea. The North Aral only made up 5% of the total area of the Aral Sea before it was drained, but is now the largest and healthiest remaining part of the Aral. The Kokaral dam is named after the Kokaral peninsula- which, depressingly, used to be an island. The water in the North Aral is slowly rising and creeping back closer to the towns and villages which once bordered it. The toxin and salt laden fish caught in the North Aral are steadily (albeit slowly) becoming safer for human consumption. (Not that the inhabitants could ever afford to stop eating it, no matter how bad for you it was.)
In comparison, however, Uzbekistan comes out looking pretty badly. The Uzbeki government is quite literally doing nothing to preserve the Aral. Not only do they willingly allow agriculture to use up all of the water of the Amu Darya, they've begun exploring the Aral Basin for oil and gas deposits, which will be much easier to extract with the basin dry. They're not, however, completely ignoring the plight of the locals- they're at least planting saxual trees on the seabed to try to hold down more of the toxic dust and constructing artificial fishponds to do the same and help provide employment to the locals, but both are really just bandaids on a missing limb.
A former Aral Sea harbor. [Image source]
While the North Aral might be turning into a minor (and largely unexpected) environmental victory, by and large the future of the Aralkum Desert is a grim one. The death of the Aral Sea is on the shortlist for the greatest environmental catastrophe in human history- and, as we'll get to later in this series, it's hardly likely to be the last such catastrophe we'll suffer.
Bibliography:
- Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization, by David R. Montgomery
- https://www.rferl.org/a/toxic-aral-sea-salt-storm-sweeps-over-parts-of-uzbekistan-turkmenistan/29257503.html
- https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=43299
- https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/06/uzbekistan-dying-sea-mafia-rule-toxic-fish-150610102819386.html
- https://www.bbc.com/news/resources/idt-a0c4856e-1019-4937-96fd-8714d70a48f7
- http://www.who.int/gho/child_health/mortality/neonatal_infant_text/en/
- https://www.wired.com/2017/02/didier-bizet-aral-dreams/
- https://www.geolounge.com/aralkum-desert-worlds-newest-desert/
- http://www.worldbank.org/en/results/2005/09/01/saving-a-corner-of-the-aral-sea
- https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldOfChange/aral_sea.php
- https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=6452
- http://www.columbia.edu/~tmt2120/introduction.htm
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aralkum_Desert
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dike_Kokaral
Even if I schemed day and night for a century to create exponential misery for humanity through intentional ecologic pollution and destruction, I would not be able to accomplish a fraction of what these "reformers" accomplished with their hobby-level commitment. Well-meaning idiots are far worse than the worst tyrant. The evils residing within reformers will even make psychopaths shudder with fear.
Well, there is the High Aswan Dam in Egypt, which though nominally altruistic, was fairly publicly merely a vanity project, and it's another contender for worst environmental disaster- but it might be one of the exceptions that prove the rule here.
Had that fool Nasser intentionally burnt down half of Cairo and constructed his version of domus aurea, he would have done more for the welfare of the Egyptian people than all his so-called modernizing projects. What sheer hubris to imagine he, Nasser, can bend the Nile to his will and "improve" the annual Nile floods. There is a special place in hell for megalomaniac reformers like Nasser.
One of my ideas for a comic literally starts with one of the returned Egyptian gods kicking down the Aswan High Dam.
Great post as always!
Sounds like an awesome comic too. This is what I imagine it would look like with the Gods coming in (led by Osiris) to take out the Aswan Dam:
New meme inspired by this post by @mountainwashere
Once your comic gets to the big screen, would be awesome to have this playing in the background whilst Osiris kicks down the Aswan dam. Not to take away from any of the merits of the comic (which I am sure will be awesome based on your current and former posts).
Enjoy the rest of the weekend!
I think you'll find reformers is often just a label for developers and agriculture business looking to line their pockets. This is why more sane areas of the world try to inhibit their ability to fuck everything up even unintentionally with environmental impact reports. Unfortunately in my experience their is often a lot of inadequate science and opinion in them plus unskilled government bodies who get to say "Yes" regardless. EIRs can and do get challenged by citizens as wrong or inadequate but those kinds of actions are expensive, lengthy which puts up a huge hurdle against them.
In other places without them you're just destined to take whatever the bozos in control push through. But hey, at least the cause here is well known and it isn't global warming. Just local greed and ineptitude.
I remember having read a lot about this when I was a teen, in the 1990s. Of course, I didn't have more information than "the Aral sea is disappearing at that time". What is shocking me the most is that today we (humans) know, but we do continue ruining it.
Anything in the name of profit and progress!
As always :(
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