In the Uzbek town of Moynaq, fishing trawlers lie rusting in the sand, keeled over like stranded whales, while camels amble past their hulls. Moynaq was once a busy port; its cannery packed fish by the millions of tins. Today the nearest open water lies far over the horizon — the shoreline retreated year after year until it was more than a hundred kilometres away. The ships never sailed off; the sea did.
In 1960 the Aral Sea, straddling what is now the border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, covered roughly 68,000 square kilometres, making it the fourth-largest lake in the world — behind only the Caspian Sea, Lake Superior and Lake Victoria. It was fed by two great Central Asian rivers: the Amu Darya, known to the ancients as the Oxus, and the Syr Darya. Then Soviet planners had an idea. Central Asia would become a cotton empire — "white gold" for export — and the deserts would be made to bloom. Beginning in earnest in the 1960s, colossal irrigation works siphoned off the rivers, among them the Karakum Canal, one of the longest irrigation canals on Earth, which lost a large share of its water to leakage into the desert sands. The cotton plan worked, after a fashion: Uzbekistan became one of the world's leading cotton producers. The bill went to the sea.
The unravelling
Starved of its rivers, the Aral began to fall — slowly at first, then relentlessly, in places by close to a metre a year. As the volume shrank, salinity soared to many times its original level, and the native fish died. A fishing industry that had employed tens of thousands of people and once landed on the order of forty thousand tonnes a year simply ceased to exist; Moynaq in the south and Aralsk in the north became ports without water. By the late 1980s the sea had split into a Small (northern) Aral and a Large (southern) Aral. By the mid-2000s it held only around a tenth of its original volume, and in 2014 NASA satellite images showed the eastern basin of the southern sea completely dry — a first in modern history. Soviet planners had foreseen much of this and pressed on regardless; some experts of the era argued openly that the Aral was expendable, its evaporation a fair price for cotton.
What replaced the water may be worse than the emptiness. The exposed seabed is now the Aralkum, often called the youngest desert on Earth: tens of thousands of square kilometres of salt crust laced with residues of the pesticides and fertilisers that had washed off the cotton fields for decades. Windstorms strip this bed and fling salt-and-dust plumes across the region and far beyond. In Karakalpakstan, the Uzbek region nearest the former shore, doctors have documented elevated rates of respiratory disease and other illness. Even the climate coarsened: the vast lake had moderated the seasons, and without it summers grew hotter and winters colder.
The sea kept one more secret. On Vozrozhdeniya — "Rebirth" — Island, the Soviet military ran a secret biological weapons testing ground known as Aralsk-7, where agents including anthrax were tested; a large stockpile of anthrax spores was hastily buried there in the late 1980s. As the water fell, the island grew, and in the early 2000s it joined the mainland altogether — a bioweapons graveyard suddenly reachable on foot. A US-funded expedition decontaminated the burial sites in 2002.
A partial resurrection
The story has one hopeful chapter, and it belongs to Kazakhstan. Rather than lose everything, engineers built the Kok-Aral dam, completed in 2005 with World Bank backing, to wall off the Small Aral in the north and stop its water draining away south into the dying larger basin. It worked beyond expectation: the northern sea rose, salinity fell sharply, native fish returned, and fishing boats put out once more from villages near Aralsk. The southern sea, by contrast, has largely been surrendered — a hypersaline western lobe lingers, while Uzbekistan plants drought-hardy saxaul shrubs across the Aralkum to pin down the poisoned dust. The United Nations has described the Aral's destruction as one of the planet's worst environmental disasters — remarkable above all because it was not an accident but a plan, executed on schedule.
The Aral's lesson is written in salt across two countries: a sea is not a permanent fact of geography but a balance of flows — and a balance, once spent, is astonishingly hard to buy back.
Quiz nuggets
- In 1960 the Aral Sea was the world's fourth-largest lake, at roughly 68,000 square kilometres, after the Caspian, Superior and Victoria.
- Soviet diversion of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya for cotton irrigation shrank the Aral to around a tenth of its volume by the mid-2000s.
- Moynaq in Uzbekistan, famed for its ship graveyard, ended up more than a hundred kilometres from the retreating shoreline.
- The exposed seabed is the Aralkum, often called Earth's youngest desert; Vozrozhdeniya Island, a Soviet anthrax test site, became a peninsula in the early 2000s.
- Kazakhstan's Kok-Aral dam, completed in 2005, revived the northern Small Aral and brought fishing back to Aralsk.