Rico's rants: Drying up

01 July 2016

Drying up

National Geographic has an article by Brian Clark Howard about the man-made disaster of the Aral Sea:

Once the fourth largest lake in the world, Central Asia's shrinking Aral Sea has reached a new low, thanks to decades-old water diversions for irrigation and a more recent drought. Satellite imagery released this week by NASA shows that the eastern basin of the freshwater body is now completely dry. "It is likely the first time it has completely dried in six hundred years, since medieval desiccation associated with the diversion of the Amu Darya river to the Caspian Sea," Philip Micklin, an Aral Sea expert and a geographer emeritus from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, told NASA about the sea's eastern basin.
An image (above) made by NASA's Terra satellite in August of 2015 and released on Tuesday shows the sea without its eastern lobe, a noticeable difference from an image made on 25 August 2000.
Actually a freshwater lake, the Aral Sea once had a surface area of 26,000 square miles . It had long been been ringed with prosperous towns and supported a lucrative muskrat pelt industry and thriving fishery, providing forty thousand jobs and supplying the then-Soviet Union with a sixth of its fish catch.
The Aral Sea was fed by two of Central Asia's mightiest rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. But, in the 1960s, Soviet engineers decided to make the vast steppes bloom. They built an enormous irrigation network, including twenty thousand miles of canals, forty-five dams, and more than eighty reservoirs, all to irrigate sprawling fields of cotton and wheat in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. But the system was leaky and inefficient, and the rivers drained to a trickle. In the decades that followed, the Aral Sea was reduced to a handful of small lakes, with a combined volume that was one-tenth the original lake's size and that had much higher salinity, due to evaporation. As a result of the drying over the past decades, millions of fish died, coastlines receded miles from towns, and those few people who remained were plagued by dust storms that contained the toxic residue of industrial agriculture and weapons testing in the area.
By 2000, the lake had separated into the Northern (Small) Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and the Southern (Large) Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. The South Aral had further split into western and eastern lobes. The eastern lobe of the South Aral nearly dried up in 2009 but rebounded in 2010 after more rain.
According to Micklin, the recent desiccation is due to continued withdrawals from the rivers for irrigation and less rain and snow in the Pamir Mountains, whose runoff feeds the Amu Darya.
In 2005, a World Bank‒funded dam and restoration project began in Kazakhstan with the goal of improving the health of the Syr Darya and increasing the flow into the North Aral Sea. Since then the water level has risen there and salinity has decreased. But Micklin said he expects cyclical drying will "continue for some time" in the eastern basin.