Why Is the Aral Sea Shrinking?
- The Main Cause—Soviet Canals. In the 1940s, the European USSR was going through a widespread drought and famine, and as a result, Stalin launched what is known as the Great ...
- The Destruction of the Aral Sea. ...
- End of the Fishing Industry. ...
- Restoring the Northern Aral Sea. ...
- Low Hopes for the Western Sea. ...
- Environmental and Human Catastrophe. ...
- Sources. ...
Can we save the Aral Sea?
When it comes to the Aral sea, there is little that can be done there, unfortunately. I do not think that the Aral is beyond saving, at least in the theoretical sense. There were other times centuries ago when the Aral has fluctuated due to periods of heavy agricultural water use or otherwise.
What is causing the Aral Sea to disappear?
- The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth-largest lake, but an irrigation project drained nearly all the water.
- The consequences include the loss of a fishing industry, salt-laden dust affecting crops and human health, and an altered climate.
- A dam has increased water levels in a small part of the lake called the North Aral.
Why has so much of the Aral Sea dried up?
The sea, whichborders Uzbekistan and Kazakhstanand was once 26,000 square miles, has dried up significantly since the 1960s when the rivers that fed it were largely diverted in a Soviet project to boost cotton production in the arid region.
What caused damaged to the Aral Sea?
Why Is the Aral Sea Shrinking?
- The Main Cause—Soviet Canals. In the 1940s, the European USSR was going through a widespread drought and famine, and as a result, Stalin launched what is known as the Great ...
- The Destruction of the Aral Sea. ...
- End of the Fishing Industry. ...
- Restoring the Northern Aral Sea. ...
- Low Hopes for the Western Sea. ...
- Environmental and Human Catastrophe. ...
- Sources. ...
Why is Aral Sea shrinking?
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.
What is destroying the Aral Sea?
In October 1990 Western scientists confirmed the virtual disappearance of the Aral Sea in Soviet Central Asia, formerly the fourth largest inland sea in the world. The loss of sea water was the result of 60 years of intensive agriculture and pollution by the Soviet authorities.
What happened to the Aral Sea and why?
With rainfall composing only one-fifth of the lake's water supply, the Aral Sea began shrinking rapidly from the 1960s. Over the course of four decades, the basin decreased to a tenth of its original size, ultimately almost splitting into a northern section on the Kazakh side and a southern section on the Uzbek side.
What is the main cause of the shrinking of the Aral Sea quizlet?
What is the primary reason for the shrinking of the Aral Sea? Large-scale irrigation projects implemented by the Soviets in the 1950s have diverted water from the two rivers that feed the sea.
What are the main problems of the Aral Sea?
Among the environmental problems of the entire Aral Sea basin caused by large-scale irrigation, the increasing salinization of irrigated land and water is the biggest one. Currently, over 70% of the irrigated land in Karakalpakstan is affected by salinity, and problems are worsening.
Who is responsible for the Aral Sea disaster?
By establishing a program to promote agriculture and especially that of cotton, Soviet government led by Khrouchtchev in the 1950s deliberately deprived the Aral Sea of its two main sources of water income, which almost immediately led to less water arriving to the sea.
Has the Aral Sea dried up?
Satellite images by NASA in August 2014 revealed that for the first time in modern history the eastern basin of the Aral Sea had completely dried up. The eastern basin is now called the Aralkum Desert.
Why has the Aral Sea the fourth largest freshwater lake on Earth Almost Disappeared?
Now it's nearly gone. NASA's Earth Observatory has posted some staggering photos of the vanishing Aral Sea. The lake, tucked between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was once the fourth-largest in the world. Today, after decades of being drained for irrigation, it's nearly gone.
Why did the Aral Sea lose its water?
The Aral Sea was once the world's fourth largest lake, but has lost most of its water due to diversions of the rivers that sustained it. Images courtesy of NASA. By 2005, the lake had lost 80% of its water. Most of the fish – and 60,000 fishing jobs – had disappeared. Click to see full answer.
How can the Aral Sea be realistically rehabilitated?
How can the Aral Sea be realistically rehabilitated is by Improving quality of irrigation canals, installing desalination plants, use fewer chemicals and installing dams to fill in the Aral Sea. In 1994, California State Water Resources Control Board ordered the DWP to raise the sea levels.
What are the environmental problems of the Aral Sea basin?
Among the environmental problems of the entire Aral Sea basin caused by large-scale irrigation, the increasing salinization of irrigated land and water is the biggest one. Currently, over 70% of the irrigated land in Karakalpakstan is affected by salinity, and problems are worsening.
Why is the Aral Sea important?
Similarly, why is the Aral Sea important? In the early 1900s, the Aral Sea was the fourth largest inland lake in the world, providing a wealth of important ecosystem services to communities, including fishing stocks and preservation of surrounding water and soil quality.
Where is the Aral Sea located?
Answer: Aral Sea has "shrunk immensely/dried up" in the "recent past" due to "human activities". Its located in the Central Asia between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In Turkish language, Aral means islands.
When was the Aral Sea depression formed?
The Aral Sea depression was formed toward the end of the Neogene Period (which lasted from about 23 to 2.6 million years ago). Sometime during that process the hollow was partially filled with water—a portion of which came from the Syr Darya.
Does the Aral Sea exist?
Today, the Aral Sea does not exist. There are, instead, two distinct bodies of water: the North Aral Sea (also known as the “Small Sea,” in Kazakhstan) and the South Aral Sea (in Uzbekistan).
When did the Aral Sea start drying up?
It's thought to have started drying up when lots of dams and canals were built in the 1960s. They stopped two big rivers from providing water into the Aral Sea - and the sea started shrinking. Ricky finds out what's being done to save this disappearing sea...
What is the disappearing sea called?
The disappearing Aral Sea. Forty years ago the Aral Sea was bustling with fishermen and boats - but now it's almost completely disappeared. The 26,000 square miles of sea is now called Aralkum or 'The Aral Sands' locally. It's thought to have started drying up when lots of dams and canals were built in the 1960s.
When did the Aral Sea split?
The final chapter began in 2005, when the World Bank gave Kazakhstan the first $68 million credit to build a 13-kilometer-long dam to split the Aral Sea into halves: the Northern Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and the Southern Aral Sea in Uzbekistan.
What did the wind blow from the seabed?
In vain, fishermen waited for the sea to come back: there were no fish, there was no money for their families. The wind blew dry, salty air from the former seabed far to the south and east. The air mixed with fertilizers and pesticides that for decades were washed from the fields into the sea by irrigation water.
Where is the Kyzylkum Desert?
MOSCOW, Russia — Photographs that NASA released this week show the graphic chronicle of a natural disaster in Central Asia’s Kyzylkum Desert. The images from the Terra satellite feature the patches of water remaining in the disappearing Aral Sea, which was once the fourth largest inland sea in the world. They look dark green in 2001, light green in ...
Did the Aral Sea dry up faster?
On the southern, Uzbek side, however, the sea dried up that much faster. Uzbekistan, largely dependent on cotton, the industry of white gold, could not afford to re-channel water to its half. Also, with the water vanishing, the Russian oil company Lukoil found a silver lining in the disaster, setting out in 2006 to explore for oil and gas on the bottom of the Aral Sea in the Uzbek sector.
Why is the Aral Sea fishing industry so devastated?
Due to the declining sea levels, salinity levels became too high for the 20 native fish species to survive. The only fish that could survive the high-salinity levels was flounder. Due to the declining sea levels, former fishing towns along the original shores have become ship graveyards.
How much did it cost to restore the Aral Sea?
Redirecting water from the Volga, Ob and Irtysh rivers to restore the Aral Sea to its former size in 20–30 years at a cost of US$30–50 billion. Pumping sea water into the Aral Sea from the Caspian Sea via a pipeline, and diluting it with fresh water from local catchment areas. Cotton picking in Uzbekistan.
Why are Aral trout extinct?
The salinity increase and drying of the lake extirpated the Aral trout, ruffe, Turkestan barbel and all sturgeon species, and dams now block their return and migration routes, with the Aral trout and Syr Darya sturgeon ( Pseudoscaphirhynchus fedtschenkoi) possibly extinct due to their restricted range. All other native fish barring the stickleback (which persisted during the lake's shrinkage and salinity increase) were also extirpated, but have returned to the North Aral Sea following its recovery from the 1990s onwards.
What is the North Aral Sea Project?
The largest project in this phase is the North Aral Sea Project, a direct effort to recover the northern region of the Aral Sea. The North Aral Sea Project's main initiative is the construction of a dam across the Berg Strait, a deep channel which connects the North Aral Sea to the South Aral Sea.
What is the only native species of the Aral Sea?
The Ukrainian stickleback ( Pungitius platygaster) was the only native species of the Aral Sea to survive its reduction and salinization.
How high was the Aral lake in 2010?
In the first half of the 20th century prior to the irrigation, the sea's water level above sea level held steady at 53 m. By 2010 the large Aral was 27 m and the small Aral 43 m above sea level. The disappearance of the lake was no surprise to the Soviets, they expected it to happen long before.
How big is the Aral Sea?
Formerly the fourth largest lake in the world with an area of 68,000 km 2 (26,300 sq mi), the Aral Sea began shrinking in the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects. By 1997, it had declined to 10% of its original size, splitting into four lakes: the North Aral Sea, the eastern and western basins of the once far larger South Aral Sea, and the smaller intermediate Barsakelmes Lake.
How did the disappearing Aral Sea affect the world?
The immediate effects of the disappearing Aral Sea were obvious. There were no fish to fish and farmers and local people were unable to use the water as a resource. Later on, other effects started to be noticed. The vegetation and animals started to disappear. However, it took a much longer time (i.e. 50 years), to understand that diverting water from two rivers caused glaciers to melt in other countries. The environment is a vast ecosystem of interrelated processes and affecting one thing often creates ripple effects through that ecosystem, even if this is not immediately transparent. We are in an age of China-funded megaprojects where we routinely dam up rivers and estuaries, cut down entire forests for farmland, change the chemical balance of our soils and air and create tonnes and tonnes of plastic, an ever-present resource that doesn’t decompose. We simply don’t know what problems may arise in 50 or 100 years when we disrupt our planet in such huge ways. The final lesson is that we must evaluate the consequences of our actions much more fully, and respect the complexity and importance of the environment in a way that up to the present day, we never have.
Why didn't the Aral Sea get solved?
The Aral Sea problem didn’t get solved partly due to the international nature of the problem. Every country wanted someone else to pay for more of it. Solving the problems of the Colorado is harder with competing interests from seven different states. The Salton Sea is isn’t getting funding because of disputes between federal and state legislatures arguing over who should pay the next tranche. In each one of these cases, the failure to work together and the desire to seek a deal more favourable to your own group than outsider groups has hampered a solution being found and, at times, caused irreparable harm to everyone.
What happened to the Aral Sea in 2000?
Despite the fact that the Aral Sea used to be the fourth largest in the world, by the year 2000, the Aral Sea started to disintegrate. The northern and southern parts of the sea had split in two and just one year later, the South Aral sea had split into an eastern and western part. In 2014, that eastern part had disappeared, being decimated by high evaporation rates and little inflows. The rest of the Aral Sea looked set to disappear altogether.
What were the effects of the Aral Sea?
Soon, the Aral Sea lost its ability to regulate the climate, and dust storms started to ravage the area, picking up all the salt from the former seabed. The health consequences were catastrophic. Tuberculosis, infections, parasites, typhus, typhoid, hepatitis, anaemia and asthma skyrocketed and child mortality soared to 75 children dying in every 1000. Over half of those children died of respiratory diseases due to the salt, minerals, and dust in the air. The people living in the region couldn’t even farm. As well as salt being dumped on vegetation, ground water dried up and as a result 40% of all vegetation died, allowing invasive desert species to take over.
How did the world save the Aral Sea?
Saving the sea wasn’t impossible. The World Bank, who had been merely observing the catastrophe, gave the funds needed to a complete a proper dam. They also gave funds to mend the leaking Soviet-era irrigation canals that came off the two main rivers that fed the Aral Sea. The result? One of those rivers doubled in size and the sea rose by almost 4m in six months. One year later, the North Aral Sea had increased in size by a third and water started spilling into the South Aral Sea. The water, that was once 50 km from the city of Aralsk, is now just 15 km away. Animals, such as Asian foxes and donkeys, started to visit the area once more. The recovery in Aral is not complete, but it’s very much under way with the human hardships also diminishing. A fishing industry has been created once more, farming is easier, and anaemia prevalence is down by 65% due to better nutrition.
What is the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico?
The 15,000 km squared dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is an area where fertiliser run-off has created algae blooms that starve the ocean of oxygen and kill all fish.
How does unsustainable water management affect the environment?
The first lesson is that unsustainable water management practices can have a dire effect on the environment, and that this effect on the environment can have tangibly damage the economy and people’s health and happiness. It’s a common misconception that environmental cost can’t be equated to “actual cost”. In economics, there’s a term for including the negative externalities into the price of goods, it’s called true cost economics. Investment in safeguarding the environment can actual safeguard the local economy, and therefore investments in protecting the environment can often be justified in purely financial terms.
Where is the Aral Sea?
The Aral Sea is a saline endorheic basin in Central Asia; it lies between Kazakhstan in the north and Karakalpakstan, an autonomous region of Uzbekistan, in the south . The name roughly translates as "Sea of Islands", referring to more than 1,500 islands that once dotted its waters.
How big is the Aral Sea?
Formerly one of the four largest lakes in the world with an area of 68,000 square kilometres (26,300 sq mi), the Aral Sea has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet Union irrigation projects. By 2007 it had declined to 10% of its original size, splitting into four lakes – the North Aral Sea and the eastern and western basins of the once far larger South Aral Sea and one smaller lake between North and South Aral Sea. By 2009, the south-eastern lake had disappeared and the south-western lake retreated to a thin strip at the extreme west of the former southern sea.The maximum depth of the North Aral Sea is 42 m (138 ft) (as of 2008).
Is the Aral Sea part of the desert?
Once an oasis, the Aral Sea is now part of the desert, which has gained 12,750 square miles since the sea waters began to recede. The Sea has lost 75 percent of its original water volume over the past 40 years; roughly the same effect as completely draining Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. The death of the Aral Sea, environmentalists say, is in fact "a quiet Chernobyl."
Is the Aral Sea polluted?
The region's once prosperous fishing industry has been virtually destroyed, bringing unemployment and economic hardship. The Aral Sea region is also heavily polluted, with consequent serious public health problems. The retreat of the sea has reportedly also caused local climate change, with summers becoming hotter and drier, and winters colder and longer.
Is the Aral Sea toxic?
Pesticides and runoff from irrigated fields make the Aral Sea 's water a toxic brew. Overall health quality in the area is abysmally low. A shortage of clean drinking water, and air pollution from the salts and dust blowing off the sea-bed have made cholera, typhus, tuberculosis and throat cancer commonplace. The region has the world's highest rate of anemia, and the highest infant mortality rate in the former Soviet Union: one in ten babies dies.
How big is the Aral Sea?
The Aral Sea was once one of the four largest lakes in the world, covering a whopping 68,000 square kilometers ( 26,300 square miles ).
What is the worst environmental disaster in the world?
It shouldn’t surprise you that the near-disappearance of the Aral Sea has been called one of the world’s worst environmental disasters. The area’s once-booming fishing industry was destroyed. Pollution has caused health problems and climate change has resulted in hotter and drier summers and colder, longer winters. The population of Aralsk, the city that once stood on the shores of the sea, dipped dramatically. Among those who have remained, unemployment levels are high.
Is fishing in Aralsk going back to normal?
A small amount of fishing has resumed, but not enough to bring people or jobs back to Aralsk. And some say that the climate is improving and health issues decreasing. But considering the entire lake once covered 68,000 square kilometers and the newly replenished north Aral Sea covers just 3,300 square kilometers, there is clearly a very, very long way to go.
The Main Cause—Soviet Canals
The Destruction of The Aral Sea
- Thus, in the 1960s, the Aral Sea began shrinking quite rapidly, with the lake's level dropping 20-35 inches yearly. By 1987, it dried up so much that instead of one lake, there were now two: the Large Aral (south) and the Small Aral (north). While up to 1960, the water level was about 174 ft above sea level, it suddenly dropped to 89 ft in the Large Lake and 141 in the Small Lake. Yet, the worl…
End of The Fishing Industry
- The Soviet Union was aware of some of the threats their economic decision posed to the Aral Sea and its region, but they regarded the cotton crops as far more valuable than the area's fishing economy. Soviet leaders also felt the Aral Sea was unneeded since the water that flowed in basically evaporated with nowhere to go. Prior to the evaporation of the lake, the Aral Sea produ…
Restoring The Northern Aral Sea
- In 1991, the Soviet Union was disbanded, and Uzbekistan and Kazakhstanbecame the new official homes to the vanishing Aral Sea. Since then, Kazakhstan, along with UNESCO and a multitude of other organizations, have been working to resuscitate the Aral Sea.
Low Hopes For The Western Sea
- However, with the damming of the northern lake in 2005, the fate of the southern two lakes was nearly sealed and the autonomous northern Uzbek region of Karakalpakstan will continue to suffer as the western lake continues to vanish. Nonetheless, cotton still continues to be grown in Uzbekistan. As if following in the old USSR traditions, the country comes near a standstill during …
Sources
- “UNESCO Launches New Aral Sea Basin Initiative.” UNESCO.
- Micklin, Philip, and Nikolay V. Aladin. “Reclaiming the Aral Sea.” Scientific American, vol. 298, no. 4, 2008, pp. 64–71.
- “Kazakhstan: Measuring the Northern Aral'.” Stephenmbland, 2015.
- Greenberg, Ilan. “As a Sea Rises, So Do Hopes for Fish, Jobs, and Riches.” The New York Tim…
- “UNESCO Launches New Aral Sea Basin Initiative.” UNESCO.
- Micklin, Philip, and Nikolay V. Aladin. “Reclaiming the Aral Sea.” Scientific American, vol. 298, no. 4, 2008, pp. 64–71.
- “Kazakhstan: Measuring the Northern Aral'.” Stephenmbland, 2015.
- Greenberg, Ilan. “As a Sea Rises, So Do Hopes for Fish, Jobs, and Riches.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 Apr. 2006.
