The sadness of the Aral Sea: this is how the USSR made the fourth largest lake in the world disappear

By the work and grace of the Soviet Union, where the gigantic Aral Sea used to be located, the same one that for more than ten thousand years was one of the four largest lakes in the world, now there is only sand. In those same waters where once there were sturgeon, trout, pike, carp and perch, today there are only abandoned ships that form a kind of ghost graveyard of junk. In fact, in 1933, the French novelist Pierre Benoit wrote a story for the magazine ‘Black and White’ in which he referred to “the blue passion flowers that grew in spring on the shores of the Aral Sea”. But today… nothing. Throughout history, the Aral Sea had benefited from significant inflows from the Amu Darya and Sir Darya rivers, reaching 68,000 square kilometers in area. Only these two fluvial arteries, which are fed by the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, had enough flow to fill the lake, despite the fact that the heat evaporated 40% of its waters during the journey. Thanks to this, the neighboring populations were very prosperous and had important fishing, livestock and agricultural industries. The region became a kind of orchard around which an important trade developed. Everything worked like a charm in that vast region during the first three decades of the Soviet Union. In 1949, ABC was still reporting a strange “rain of frogs” over the gigantic lake. An unusual piece of news, but one that gave an account of a region full of life: «Frogs have rained on the town of Kazaly, in Kazakhstan, next to the Aral Sea. It is believed that a waterspout absorbed the frogs from various lagoons and precipitated them on the town, as has happened in various parts of the world. Standard Related News No The USSR’s brutal hunt against the father of nuclear fusion: “Russia is a giant concentration camp” Israel Viana Andrei Sakharov contributed to the development of this technique and the construction of the first hydrogen bomb in 1953, but later it denied its military use and confronted the Soviet Union for it. However, the communist regime drastically changed the situation and decided that the time had come to let it die for a supposed economic gain. Immediately after the Second World War, the Kremlin decided to increase the production of cotton at any price, known as “white gold”, the world demand for which had skyrocketed since the war. In the late 1950s, the Central Asian republics, especially Uzbekistan, began to rapidly expand their arable areas. The problem is that, in basically desert terrain, it was decided to obtain water by diverting the course of the rivers. One of the ships that stayed over the Aral desert Controlling nature The communists believed that they could dominate and control nature at will. In 1956 they inaugurated the Karakum canal, 1,100 kilometers long, a gigantic engineering work whose mission was to transport water from the Amu Darya to the new cotton plantations stolen from the desert. Also, that was not the only case. On their way to the Aral Sea, the courses of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya were interrupted at numerous points in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The result was spectacular: between 1960 and 1988 cotton production increased by 80% in Uzbekistan and by more than 350% in nearby Turkmenistan. On a commercial level it seemed like a good idea, but on an environmental level it was an absolute disaster and the consequences were not long in coming. The experts calculated that the contribution of water from both rivers to the Aral Sea, which traditionally reached 70 cubic kilometers a year, fell drastically below 20 in the most favorable years, and in the area occupied by the lake began to appear the desert. Where before there was a huge fishing fleet that came to supply a sixth of the fish consumed in the Soviet Union, the skeletons of the ships were left on the sand. ‘Aral, the dying sea’, headlined ‘Black and White’ an extensive report from 1993 in which he analyzed “the world’s greatest ecological catastrophe”. And he added: «It may be too late to avoid it. The proportions of the tragedy are gigantic and directly affect the lives of millions of people, the survival of numerous aquatic and terrestrial species, and the climate of a vast region of the USSR. The person responsible for the death of what was, just a few decades ago, one of the largest lakes on Earth is the human being. Satellite images of the Aral Sea. On the left, in the year 2000, and on the right, in 2018 NASA Poisons and stranded ships The Aral Sea disappeared without anyone, not even the Soviet authorities who had caused it, managing to prevent it. And it did not do it at the slow and invisible pace that geological and climatic changes usually have, but at a dizzying speed. The figures at the beginning of the 1990s spoke clearly: since 1960, the Aral Sea had lost three quarters of its water, its surface area had been reduced by half and its depth had decreased by more than twenty meters. Tens of square kilometers, few before navigable, appeared as a sandy and saline desert in which nothing could grow. Dozens of coastal towns watched as, in the course of a single generation, the sea receded up to thirty kilometers, rendering their ports useless and stranding their boats. The strong winds in the area were also in charge of completing the panorama, sweeping what was once the bottom of the lake and spreading around one hundred million tons of saline dust per year that mixed with the remains of poisons, fertilizers and other industrial waste that the Soviets have been abusing since the 1950s. The desiccation was so rapid that, in the year 2000, the southern zone was already separated into two small blocks of water. One western and one eastern. And the latter has already completely disappeared in recent years. The saddest thing about this whole story is that it occurred with the absolute ignorance of the international community. Especially during those early years when cotton production was a total success. That is why the authorities decided to keep the environmental catastrophe a secret and continue to influence it. Finally, in 2003, NASA published some satellite photos that showed the reality of what was happening with the Aral Sea. Image of one of the ships stranded in the Aral Sea A small hope All this also caused the exodus of thousands of families. Those who dared to stay faced health problems related to water and air pollution. Since 2005, however, the northern part of the Aral Sea has been slightly recovering due to the construction of the KoKaral dam, a 13-kilometre-long dam built by the Kazakh government with financial assistance from the World Bank. This separates the two parts into which the old lake was divided. “Economically significant fish banks have reappeared, and observers who have written about the environmental catastrophe in the Aral Sea will be surprised to find that rising water levels are partly revitalizing the fishing industry and producing surplus for export to places as far away as Ukraine”, reported “The New York Times” in 2006. A year later, the newspaper “International Herald Tribune” added: “The dam has caused the level of the small Aral Sea, or the northern part of it, to It has risen about 38 meters. However, the southern area of ​​the Aral Sea, in Uzbekistan, is doomed to certain death.