Juorney to the Aral Sea. Part 4. Ship graveyard in the desert.

Hello, I was really surprised and shocked when my previous post about Aral Sea has been upvoted by the Curie community. I've got over 1100 upvotes. Wow! Thank you very much! I appreciate to all guys who read and uprvoted my posts . Also I appreciate to Steemworldmap and Curie community for their mutual support.

So, let me present the final fourth part of my photo report about the trip to the Aral Sea. I kindly remind you that the first part was dedicated to Sudoch’e Lake, the second one to the Aral Sea itself, and the third one to the Ustyurt Plateau. The fourth part, as I promised before, will be devoted to the ship graveyard in the desert.

So, we admired the canyon on the Ustyurt plateau and went to the final location - in the city of Muynak. Muynak was once a fishing center on the Aral Sea and the largest port of Karakalpakstan. In 1963, it received the status of a city and the population at one time exceeded 100 thousand people and the fishing fleet consisted of more than a hundred and fifty ships.

More recently, some 30 years ago, there was still a sea here. This lighthouse was illuminating at night to the fishing ships, showing them the way home. Now it is a museum dedicated to the gone sea.

Once it seemed that the fish wealth of the Aral Sea is inexhaustible, but due to the withdrawal of water for irrigation of cotton fields the sea level has decreased. The concentration of salt increased and, in addition, mineralization increased due to fertilizers, which brought the remains of the waters of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. Freshwater fish is either extinct or mutated. Now Kazakh and Uzbek environmentalists are trying to increase the number of fish in the sea but this is not enough.

The sea is rapidly leaving. In the 1980s a view of the sea stretched beyond the horizon. Our driver told me that he found the sea when he came to Muynak in the early 1980s. At the same time, the width of the channel of the Amu Darya reached more than three kilometers, now it does not exceed 300 meters. There were years when the water did not reach the Aral at all and the drinking water was delivered to Muynak by helicopters.

Now the sand dunes instead of sea go over the horizon. Once there was a harbor and fishing vessels moored here. The sea is gone, people are gone - now there are hardly 30,000 people from the 100,000 people and only the ships remained ... And, if I may say so, they continue to feed the city. Tourists come here to photograph the rusty remains of ships. The second year here held an international festival of electronic music. People say that it is a great event. The most quantity of ships were cut into scrap metal and.

I wanted to visit this ship graveyard for a long time and my dream came true, finally. When we passed the lighthouse, we saw a precipice and rusty remains of the ships lined up in a single line. Although, it would be more correct to call them boats or launch boats. The driver said that before the ships were scattered on the seabed in a chaotic manner and a few years ago they were pulled closer to the lighthouse. But I think it is even symbolic - the ships lined up in a single line towards the gone sea ...

Some ships were left with such metal skeletons and others are preserved in relatively good condition. They say that if the sea returns, they can be repaired and returned to the service.

How it was here before ...

Source

It was an interesting trip. Difficult, but very interesting. The most annoying thing is that a lot of documentaries have been shot about the Aral. Many articles were written and many photos were taken, but we are continuing to flood the fields with water. We do not appreciate this resource absolutely. It seems that the water is infinite. But the example of the Aral Sea shows that this is far from being the case and the water can leave very quickly ...

!steemitworldmap 43.786965 lat 59.034813 long Juorney to the Aral Sea. Part 4. Ship graveyard in the desert. d3scr