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The Aral Sea is a well known environmental disaster zone. But this year, it got a whole worse, writes Anson Mackay, as its biggest basin dried up completely to expose a toxic, salty wasteland. With continuing irrigation and declining river flows due to climate change, the desert is only set to expand.
The Aral Sea has reached a new low, literally and figuratively. New satellite images from NASA show that, for the first time in its recorded history, its largest basin has completely dried up.
However, the Aral Sea has an interesting history – and as recently as 600-700 years ago it was as small, if not smaller, than today.
The Aral recovered from that setback to become the world’s fourth largest lake, but things might not be so easy this time round.
Today, more people than ever rely on irrigation from rivers that should instead flow into the sea, and the impact of irrigation is compounded by another new factor: climate change.
Really a lake – but now, a wasteland
Sandwiched between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Aral Sea is actually a lake, albeit a salty, ‘terminal’ one. It is salty because evaporation of water from the lake surface is greater than the amount of water being replenishing through rivers flowing in.
It is terminal because there is no outflowing river. This makes the Aral Sea very sensitive to variations in its water balance caused either by climate or by humans.
Indeed, the sea has long been a cause celebre in the world of environmental catastrophes, an exemplar of the devastating harm that ill thought-out economic policies can have on the environment.
Intensive irrigation of cotton plantations in the deserts of the western Soviet Union prevented water reaching the Aral Sea, leading to the drastically low levels we see today. This in turn meant the highly-salty waters killed off many plants and animals.
During early Soviet Union times, the Aral Sea and its fringing wetlands were a significant resource for the fishing industries, agriculture, animal husbandry and fur trapping.
With climate change and continuing irrigation, water flows will cease
A key question that remains today therefore is how much of the lake’s current regression is due to intensive irrigation and how much may be due to climate change over the past 50 years. Recent studies suggest only 14% of the shrinking of the Aral Sea since the 1960s was caused by climate change, with irrigation by far the biggest culprit.
Continue reading at ENN affiliate, The Ecologist.
Former Aral Sea image via Shutterstock.