A sea the size of a country shrank to a tenth and dust
The Aral Sea, once Earth’s third-largest lake at 68,000 square kilometres between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, began dying in the 1960s when Soviet irrigation stole its rivers. By 2007 only about ten percent remained, split into remnant basins Ban Ki-moon later called a planetary disaster.
Kazakhstan’s 2005 Kokaral dike raised the North Aral some twelve metres by 2008 versus 2003 levels, cut salinity, and brought fish back enough for limited catches. Diverted Syr Darya and vanished Amu inflows left southern deserts and ruined fleets at places like Muynak. Middleton notes the Amu may have only turned toward the Aral in the Holocene after earlier Caspian-bound courses.
What vanished was not only water but a climate buffer, a fishery civilisation, and a cautionary atlas entry.
Its name means roughly Sea of Islands, after the more than 1,100 islands that once dotted it. By 2007 it had broken into four lakes: the North Aral, the eastern and western basins of the South Aral, and small Barsakelmes Lake. The loss has precedent: the geographer Hafiz-i Abru wrote in 1417 of the sea vanishing after both feeder rivers were diverted, and the Syr Darya came back only after 1573, when the channels steering it south fell into disrepair, letting the basin refill over four centuries.
Russian ships arrived in 1847 with the founding of Fort Aralsk, their hulls hauled overland in pieces from Orenburg because the sea connects to no other water. Alexey Butakov's expedition made the first observations in 1848. The basin once held three endemic sturgeon species, all now locally extinct, and fish introduced in the 1960s, such as Baltic herring and gobies, wiped out much of the zooplankton. As the North Aral freshened from the 1990s, lost crustaceans and rotifers returned down the Syr Darya, whose diverted water irrigates about two million hectares in the Ferghana Valley.
Source: Aral Sea
