Vanishing Sea

A half-century ago, the Aral Sea was a vast oasis in the desert of central Asia. It covered an area bigger than West Virginia, and its fishing industry employed thousands of workers and brought in more than 40,000 tons of fish every year. Today, though, only a tiny fraction of the Aral Sea remains healthy; the rest is doomed. Rusting ships sit on what was once its bottom, and dust storms blow away the polluted sediments, causing health problems for the remaining residents.

The Aral was once one of the world’s largest inland seas. Rivers brought rainwater and snowmelt from distant mountains. In the 1960s, though, the Soviet Union decided to divert that water for farming. Cotton fields sprang up around the Aral, and the sea itself began to disappear.

By the 1980s, the Aral had lost so much of its freshwater input from rivers that it was too salty to support most fish. The annual catch dropped to zero. And by early in this century, the sea had lost about 85 percent of its water and split into a small northern component, and a much bigger southern one.

Without the sea to moderate the climate, summers became hotter and winters colder. Winds blew the salty sediments from the former sea floor over the surrounding land, choking off the vegetation.

In 2005, Kazakhstan built a dam between the northern and southern parts of the sea. That allowed the northern part to begin to heal. Water levels have climbed, and some fish have returned. But the southern part has basically been abandoned – an oasis turned to dust.