The Aral Sea - The Amazing Shrinking Lake

Imagine if over the course of eighty years you saw lake superior become a tenth its original size. All of the wildlife in it would die and the land left by the receding water would become vast salt deposits. Shockingly enough, that's exactly what is happening to the once vast Aral Sea between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

What could cause this kind of shocking change in such a short period of time? The Soviet Union. Up to 1960, the Aral Sea was the fourth largest body of water on Earth. It supported a rich eco-system and a prosperous fishing industry. Of course all of this changed in 1918 when the Soviet Government decided to divert two rivers feeding the inland sea into deserts to support agriculture. (Kind of reminds me of the American Southwest) Apparently the Soviets were well aware of the effects of the river diversion, and they even wrote it into some of their five year plans.

Gradually the Aral Sea just evaporated away leaving vast salt flats. Today the Aral Sea has split into three separate lakes, two of which are too salty to sustain any kind of fish. Sadly, it has a surface area barely 10% of its original size. Still there is some hope for this body of water. The government of Kazakhstan has built dams in order to help increase the water levels in the North Aral Sea (One of the lakes that was created by the receding waterline) and in recent years water levels have actually increased while salinity has fallen.

What is truly stunning about this story is how human actions can have such a profound and rapid impact on the environment. We see all sorts of environmental changes taking place all the time but rarely do we see such a stark example of what humans are truly capable of doing to the world in just a few decades.

Still interested? Watch this fantastic segment about the Aral Sea from Australian TV. A lot of haunting scenery here.