Blue No More Part 2: The Aral Sea and The Aralkum Desert

Part 1

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.

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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