The Aral Sea: The Toxic Soviet Sea, the Aral sea, Aral sea , Giographics of the Aral sea

                                           
                             

                 The Aral Sea: The Toxic Soviet Sea

Way out in the wilds of Central Asia, on theKazakh-Uzbek border, lies the toxic remains of a dying sea. For thousands of years, this sea was a lifegiver,bringing food, trade, and civilization. Covering an area the size of Ireland, it wasthe fourth largest freshwater lake in the world. But then, in the middle of the 20th Century,something happened. An irrigation project went wrong, deprivingthe sea of vital water. In its place came toxic chemicals, poisons,and shores of unbreathable dust. Today, the sea is so deadly it’s been calledthe Silent Chernobyl. But you likely know it by another name: theAral Sea, the Soviet Union’s greatest natural disaster. Beginning in 1948, Moscow diverted water awayfrom the rivers feeding the sea towards agriculture.

The plan was to make Central Asia into a fertileland of plenty. Instead, it triggered an environmental catastropheso staggering we still don’t know it’s true toll. From an ancient oasis to a modern desert ravagedby cancer-causing storms, this is the story of the Aral Sea… and the bygone empire thatkilled it. The Ancient SeaTwo and a half thousand years ago, Alexander the Great stood on the shores of the surgingriver, surveying the waters. Behind him lay the vast swathe of land heand his armies had overrun. Ahead lay an unknown frontier, a wildernessof tribes and bandits and harsh desert stretching out as far as the eye could see. As Alexander stood at the farthest northernextent of his ancient empire, little did he know that this wasn’t the end of the world. That the river before him led not to emptywasteland, but to an expanse of water so vast it dominated the horizon. Today, we know that expanse as the Aral Sea.

First appearing some 11,000 years ago, theexistence of the Aral Sea was a pleasing historical mistake. At the very end of the Neogene Period - aperiod of time so far back we might as well just call it Long Ago BC - a depression formedin Central Asia on the border area of modern-day Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. And there it remained for millions of years,doing nothing but being all low and depressing, until the Amu Darya decided to change course. Since time immemorial, the Amu Darya had flowedinto the vast Caspian Sea to the west. But now it began to flow instead into theAral Depression. As it flowed, the depression began to fillup. Began to look less like a depressing dip inthe landscape… ...and more like a lake. From this chance hydrological event, the AralSea was born. By the time Alexander the Great made it tothe shores of the second river feeding it, the sea was one of the vastest lakes on Earth.

 You know Lake Biakal in Russia? A lake so famously large that it makes LochNess look like an embarrassing puddle? Well the Aral Sea was over twice the sizeof that, and only ever so slightly smaller than Africa’s Lake Victoria. As a result, it drew thousands upon thousandsof peoples to its shorelines, from Tajiks and Uzbeks to Kazakhs, lured in by the promiseof freshwater fish to hunt and islands to colonize. Yep, freshwater. Despite its name, the Aral Sea is not a seain the “undrinkable saltwater” sense, but a regular lake with a salinity of around10g of salt per liter - compared to 35g per liter for your average ocean. Not exactly something you want coming outyour tap, but fresh enough for fish like carp to survive. As for the islands; the Aral Sea is home to1,000 islands each over 1 hectare in size.

 The name even comes from the Kyrgyz word Aral-denghiz,meaning “Sea of Islands.” For ancient peoples, this fish-stuffed, island-filledsea basically hit the civilization G-Spot. As cultures flourished along its shores, itbecame a famous stopping point along the Silk Road. But even in the dim and distant past, it wasclear just how delicate the Aral Sea was. At some point in the Middle Ages, somethinghappened to one of the two rivers feeding the Sea. We’re still not entirely sure what that“something” was; if it was human-driven, or related to some external factor. Either way, the result was an apocalypticdisaster. Shorn of one of its inflows, the Aral Seabegan to dry up. As it dried, it shrank, until entire shoresidetownships were abandoned dozens of kilometers from its waters. With the drying came economic catastrophe.

By 1417, court historian Hafizi-Abru was ableto write that the sea no longer existed. Thankfully, this spell of dryness didn’tlast. At some point in the 16th Century, the AralSea began to return. By 1570, documents suggest that it had regainedits full size. It was a historical near-miss, a moment whenthe lake was very nearly wiped out. But it was also a warning to the future. A warning that the delicate ecology of theworld’s 4th largest lake could easily be destroyed. Unfortunately, the future wasn’t in themood for listening. Here Come the RussiansIf there’s a single person you can blame for the destruction of the Aral Sea, it’sAleksandr Voeikov. Voeikov was born in 1842, right around thetime Tsar Nicholas I was beginning the wars that would bring the Aral Sea within the RussianEmpire. But Voeikov wasn’t a soldier or a politician. He was a climatologist. One who developed a bizarre dislike for theAral Sea.

Because the Aral Sea has no outflow and isinstead maintained by evaporation, Voeikov seems to have taken offense to its very existence,calling it a “useless evaporator,” and a “mistake of nature.” But what could Voeikov do about it? When he died in 1916, the lake remained; aninarguable fact of nature. But Voeikov’s writings survived. What’s more they influenced a whole generation. A generation who would soon be running theformer Russian Empire. Cut ahead to 1948. In the years after Voeikov died, ImperialRussia fell, the areas around the Aral Sea tasted independence, and then were absorbedinto the new USSR as the Kazakh and Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republics. Alongside this geopolitical shakeup, Leninhad died, Stalin had come to power, and decades of state-engineered famines, purges, and otherassorted horrors had wreaked havoc across the empire. And now Stalin wanted to go even further thanbending mere humans to his will. He wanted to mould the landscape itself.

The Great Plan for the Transformation of Naturewas the first major Soviet attempt to remake the “non-productive” areas of the empire. “Non-productive” in this case meaningvirgin forests, centers of rural life, or inland seas supporting fishing villages - stuffyou and I might class as “actually really kinda productive”. But Uncle Joe preferred a definition of “productive”that involved not ordinary people living ordinary lives, but vast plantations making Moscowrich. And so it was that a network of irrigationchannels began to spring up from the rivers feeding the Aral Sea, diverting water forgrowing cotton. Initially, these new Central Asian farms of“white gold” didn’t effect the rivers much. There was just so much water, how could humanspossibly exhaust it all? And even if they did, who cared? The people running the Soviet Ministry ofWater could all recall Voeikov’s words. If the Aral Sea was a “useless evaporator”weren’t they justified in putting its water to better use? This toxic attitude prevailed even as Khrushchevtook over after Stalin’s death and launched his own Virgin Lands Campaign.

It prevailed even as irrigation channels criss-crossedCentral Asia, diverting so much water that it was a miracle the sea survived. Yet, survive it did. As 1960 dawned, the Aral Sea was in rude health. Stretching 435km north to south, and 290kmeast to west, it was the center of vital local economies. Fishing villages dominated its shores. There were wetlands, river deltas, hiddenbays; thriving and irreplaceable ecosystems. Local towns thrived, too, like Aralsk, orTastubek - famous for its caviar. Were you to stand on the shorelines back then,you would’ve watched the fishermen in their boats, watched the children swimming, andthought to yourself that this was a vista that would last forever. Sadly, that wasn’t the case. By 1960, the Water Ministry knew the AralSea was like a camel with a back so bent its spine was one single straw away from snapping. They could stop digging irrigation ditchesright now, and preserve this perfect balance, maintaining a living lake while also growinga decent amount of cotton. But “a decent amount” simply wasn’tenough. The leadership wanted more white gold.

Eyes wide open, still loyally quoting Voeikov,the Ministry of Water demanded yet more channels be dug, yet more flow diverted. Although they knew what they were doing, theyassumed it would take decades for the effects to be felt. Generations, even. They were wrong. The Dying Sea In the summer of 1967, word began to go aroundthe small Kazakh town of Tastubek that something was wrong. As a center of caviar exports, the localswere attuned to the ecosystem they worked in. The Aral Sea had been sustaining life herefor centuries. But now something was happening. Almost before their eyes, the residents couldsee the waters drawing back, away from the shoreline, leaving the town behind. Those locals had no way of knowing it, buttheir town was like a canary lowered into a coalmine to check for leaking gas. And the agonizing death of their economy wouldbe early warning of the oncoming explosion. Over the next few years, the effects of waterdiversion began to become clearer and clearer. By 1973, some of the wetlands and deltas hadvanished, replaced by sandy desert. By 1980, the rivers feeding the sea were startingto run dry in the summer months, when temperatures soar to 40C. But it was over the next decade that the effectswould really take hold. As the 1980s wore on, the shores of the AralSea retreated.

They moved slowly at first, then quicker andquicker until old fishing villages were stranded two hours’ journey from the nearest fish. As the waters receded, the 1,000 islands theSea was famous for stopped being islands, first becoming peninsulas, and then just outcropsof rock in the midst of desert. One of these former islands was Aralsk-7,a secret bioweapons facility where Soviet scientists engineered weaponized Plague. As you’ll know if you’ve watched our videoon it, Aralsk-7 had been selected on the assumption that the Aral Sea’s waters would stop itsmicroscopic nightmares from escaping. And now the sea was gone, leaving nothingbetween plague-carrying rats and hundreds of Kazakh villages. By 1987, the drying was so bad that therewas no longer a single Aral Sea. Instead, the waters split in two, creatinga smaller North Aral Sea inside Kazakhstan, and a larger South Aral Sea mostly in Uzbekistan. As these two seas shrank, the salinity ofthe water increased, jumping from 10 grams per liter to 110. In this toxic environment, fish began to dieoff, leaving entire villages starving. Come 1992, the combined area of the Northand South Aral Seas was only 33,800 km2 - barely half the area they’d once covered.

The good news was that, come 1992, the Ministryof Water was no longer a thing. And neither was the Soviet Union. The USSR had collapsed in 1991, ending thedrive for cotton production in Central Asia. Unfortunately, the successor governments hadall realized they were staring down the barrel of economic ruin without the cotton, and sokept on growing it. And so, the Sea slowly died. By 2002, the South Aral Sea had subdividedagain, splitting into the East and West Sea. As the 21st Century dawned, towns sustainedby the sea for centuries were now abandoned some 90km from the water. Between them and the receding shore lay nothingbut empty desert spotted with the decaying hulks of abandoned ships. Faced with ruin, the people living aroundthe Sea abandoned it. Those who could, fled. Those who couldn’t sank into poverty, illness,and death. Come 2010, the East Aral Sea was barely afifth the size it had been in 2002. In 2014, it dried up entirely. In five decades, Soviet mismanagement haddone what Voeikov could never have dreamed of. It had killed the “useless evaporator,”desiccating the Sea in a way unseen even during the Middle Ages. But it wasn’t just the lack of water thatcaused disaster.

There’s a reason some refer to the AralSea as the Silent Chernobyl. Like Chernobyl, it was a disaster made ofSoviet incompetence. Like Chernobyl, it left behind a ghost town- or towns, in this case. And, like Chernobyl, it was a disaster thatcould kill you. The WastelandIn 2015, National Geographic published a series of interviews with locals living around theruins of the former Aral Sea. One of them, Yusup Kamalov from the lakesideregion of Karakalpakstan, summed up the devastation as follows:“This is what the end of the world looks like,” he said, “If we ever have Armageddon,the people of Karakalpakstan are the only ones who will survive, because we are alreadyliving it.” The Armageddon he was referring to was morethan just visual. Although photos of the dried seabed litteredwith dead ships may look strangely beautiful, the reality of living there is anything but. As the sea dried, it left behind ground thatwas saturated in salt. While the Soviet water scientists had predictedit would bake into a hard crust, it instead remained loose, at the whims of the lightestbreeze. The result is salt storms that can blow upout of nowhere, stinging your eyes and making you feel deathly ill.

But the painful concentrations of salt arejust the tip of the iceberg. The dust storms also blow deadly quantitiesof DDT, phosalone, and other pesticides. All are known to cause cancer after prolongedexposure, plus all manner of other nasty illnesses. In the years of the dead Aral Sea, cancerrates around Karakalpakstan have shot to 25 times the world average. Those who escape cancer are felled by respiratorydiseases, immune system disorders, and antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. In short, the air around the Aral Sea is toxicto breathe. And even those who escape these deadly duststorms suffer. So many chemicals have been dumped into thearea, sunk to the bottom of the waters long ago, that every part of the food chain hasbecome contaminated. If you want a single, depressing statisticto sum up the danger of living in this remote corner of the world, you should know thatinfant mortality rates here are some of the highest on Earth - growing steadily sincethe ‘70s even as they drop in the rest of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. All in all, it’s a disaster area. A place inimical to human life. And it gets worse. When the Sea vanished, the effect on the localclimate was beyond comprehension. From somewhere that experienced relativelymild weather, the Aral Depression has become somewhere that the weather Gods seem to havetaken a personal dislike to. Nowadays, temperatures swinging wildly between-40C and plus 40C are not uncommon, blasting and burning this once-fertile land into alifeless desert. It this hostile world, one of the few thingsthat seems capable of surviving is the Bubonic Plague, which occasionally causes minor outbreaks. While we’re not definitely tying the ongoingexistence of the Black Death in the Aral Sea region to the abandoned Soviet bioweaponslab working on the plague right nearby, we are saying it’s a spooky coincidence. And that, really, is the Aral Sea today.

A forgotten, toxic world festering in CentralAsia, where all that remains of a once-great lake are devastated towns and sick and pennilesspeople. According to scientists, the chances of theUzbek East Sea ever replenishing in our lifetimes are vanishingly remote. The Aral Sea, it seems, is dead. At least, in Uzbekistan it is. Earlier, we mentioned that when the Aral Seafirst divided, the North Sea wound up in Kazakhstan, and the south in Uzbekistan. While the unfolding disaster has continuedunabated in Uzbekistan, the same cannot be said for its northern neighbor. Unlikely as it seems, our video today isn’tjust a story of environmental degradation and despair, although there has been plentyof that. It’s also a story of hope. Time for us to venture upwards at last tothe North Aral Sea, where the decades of destruction haven’t just been stopped. They’ve been actively reversed. Hope Springs EternalIf you’d surveyed the North Aral Sea in 1994, chances are you’d have predicted acomplete collapse in the next few years. At that point, the North Aral Sea was dryingeven faster than the South Aral Sea. And a meeting that year between Kazakhstan,Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan on preserving the two rivers feedingit had amounted to nothing. But while things would get worse over thenext decade, they would also soon start to get better. In the early 2000s, Kazakhstan presented theWorld Bank with a plan for combating the North Aral Sea’s decline. With the Sea’s catastrophic death headlinenews at the time, the World Bank handed over $87m, likely expecting it would help slowthe decline and nothing more. But, to everyone’s surprise, the Kazakhsinstead managed to save their sea.

The first step was to completely sever theNorth Aral Sea from the South. Until the mid-2000s, a narrow channel ranbetween the two, filtering water down from Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan. The Kazakh government decided that, ratherthan let both seas die, they’d sacrifice one to save the other. A vast dyke known as the Kokaral dam was builtacross the channel, trapping the North Sea’s waters in Kazakhstan. At the same time, a massive cleanup operationwas launched along the Syr Darya River - the same river Alexander the Great had stood beside,many centuries before. When the work was completed in 2005, scientiststhought it might take ten years to replenish the North Aral Sea. To everyone’s shock, the water level rose3.3m in seven months. As the North Aral Sea slowly refilled, itssalinity levels began to drop. Shores that had been salt-swept desert sankonce more beneath the waves. The waters got closer and closer again tothe old fishing villages. As the 2010s got underway, the Kazakh governmentdecided to try reintroducing fish that had died when the salinity levels went throughthe roof. Not only did the fish survive. They thrived. Around the same time that the East Aral Seawas vanishing from existence, the North Aral Sea reopened to fishermen. Villagers who’d last caught fish in the1980s returned to the water for the first time in decades. Sons of those fishermen who’d only everknown a life of grinding poverty had their first experiences in a boat. From a dead industry, fishing in the NorthAral Sea once again became a viable way to make a living. You can see the effects most clearly in thetown of Aralsk.

A one-time port city, Aralsk slumped intodecline in the 1980s as the disaster took hold. In the depths of the crisis, this fishingtown found itself stuck 150km from sea so salty no fish could live in it. By 2018 - the closest date we could get accuratefigures for - the waters had returned to just 17km from the edge of town. With the water came bream, pike-perch, andflounder. From abandoning all hope, the older generationnow truly believes they will live to see the day the waters return to Aralsk’s docks. But for that to happen, a few more miraclesstill have to take place. While the North Aral Sea is today thriving,it has also grown back as far as it currently can. The Kokaral dam is too small to hold any morewater back, with the result that billions of cubic meters are now lost every year. It’s estimated that merely adding another4 meters’ height to the dyke would retain enough water to allow the North Aral Sea toregrow by another 400 km2. Enough to perhaps at last turn Aralsk backinto a thriving port. At time of writing, there was no deadlinefor this expansion. The Kazakh government was giving nothing morethan vague words of commitment to the project. But hopefully it will happen soon. Hopefully the elderly fishermen in Aralskwill be able to see their Sea once more, lapping at the docks, as alive as they remember itonce being.

 If that happened… well. It might just qualify as a miracle. The story of the Aral Sea, then, is actuallytwo separate stories: one about the Toxic Soviet Sea turning into desert; and one aboutthe Reborn Sea to its north. But more than that, it’s a tale about choices. About how we can look at habitat destructionand environmental degradation, and choose to either turn a blind eye and accept theworst; or to dig our heels in, grit our teeth, and do something about it - no matter whatthe cost. The recovery of the North Aral Sea hasn’tbeen easy, and it’s still a long way from where it once was. But hope has returned, bringing with it aglimpse of a better future. And if we can save a sea as contaminated anddegraded as the Aral Sea… Then maybe, just maybe, there’s hope forthe rest of our world too.