Aral Sea - What Was and What Is

Aral Sea—What Was and What Is

Since the very beginning of its existence, the human being has been developing.  It has never stopped, and it never will.  During the last couple of centuries it has been developing very aggressively, and it has reached tremendous achievements in all fields.  Unfortunately mankind has achieved tremendous success in polluting its environment also.  Nowadays, nature is missing many of its inhabitants: – those who are supposed to be under the protection of humans as young brothers and sisters. Pollution was the reason for their extinction. Finally, the humanity started paying more attention to what surrounds it.  It started thinking about the future, its future generations, and the inheritance to these generations.   People have started asking themselves more often questions like, “What will we have left to other children after us?”  Currently, humanity has plenty of global environmental problems that it has to take care of now.  Tomorrow will be too late.  Some of these global environmental problems are global warming, deforestation, freshwater contamination, destruction of ozone layer of the earth, pollution of space orbit of the earth by parts of used equipment.  Desiccation of the Aral Sea is one of the items on the list. 

The Aral Sea, which is also considered to be a lake or Inland Sea in Central Asia, is located in southwestern Kazakstan and northwestern Uzbekistan, near the Caspian Sea.  The Aral has no outlet.  The Aral Sea is still listed as the fourth largest lake in the world.  But it has been shrinking for decades, and the statistics might change.  In time the Aral Sea may not the fourth largest lake in the world anymore.

Nowadays, two major problems have risen before the governments of Uzbekistan and Kazakstan; the desiccation and as a result of this threat of the complete disappearance of the sea, and the danger of the broad extension of anthrax bacteria that was stored by the Soviet Army Vozrozdenia Island.

In comparison with the size of the sea in the 1960’s, the Sea has declined in size by seventy-six percent.  The initial reason for the Aral’s decline is the fact that Soviet planners diverted water from Aral’s two big feeding rivers (Amu Darya and Syr Darya) into cotton fields in the territory of Uzbekistan. Because of this irrigation, the sea is now seventy miles away from its former bank (in some places even more).  Ninety percent of the Syr Daya’s water is diverted into canals and reservoirs.  Millions of people in Central Asia rely on the rivers for a livelihood.  Uzbekistan, for instance, generates twenty-eight percent of its hard currency from cotton irrigated with river water (The Aral Sea, #"#">www.southampton.ac.uk/%7Eengenvir/water/aral.sea.html

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