The Aral Sea Disaster

The Aral Sea stands as one of the monstrous environmental catastrophes of the 20th Century.

Before 1960, it was the world's fourth largest inland sea – behind Asia’s Caspian Sea, North America’s Lake Superior and Africa’s Lake Victoria – with an area of 68,000 km². It had a vibrant fishing industry employing 40,000 people. Today discarded fishing boats lie on the sand 20 kilometers from shore.

In the 1950’s and 60’s Soviet engineers began diverting its two major inflowing rivers to irrigate cotton fields. As a result Uzbekistan has become one of the world’s major cotton producers. But this drawdown had a disastrous result as the sea lost most of the inflow of its source waters. The mighty Aral Sea began shrinking – and shrank steadily until, in 2004 it was only 25% of its original surface area, and by 2007 it had declined to 10% of its original size.


The collapse of the fishing industry and the degradation of the land brought unemployment and economic hardship. The retreat of the sea has reportedly also caused local climate change, with summers becoming hotter and drier, and winters colder and longer. Frequent violent dust storms blow salt and pesticide-laden winds across the region; throat cancer and respiratory disease became common.

It is no exaggeration to describe the destruction of this once-magnificent sea as a kind of ecological death.

Evaporation is crucial to the life-giving water cycle, but if there’s no inflow to replace vapor, sea and land will eventually die. Sustained drought destroys life. The Biblical paragon of patience, Job, draws an analogy between evaporation and death.

As water evaporates from a lake
and a river disappears in drought,
people are laid to rest and do not rise again.
Job 14:11-12 NLT

Job laments the tragedy of human death. It violates every survival instinct within us, the urge-for-life that makes us human. Job protests the terminal condition of human life the same way we view the tragedy of the Aral Sea.

A journalist for The Economist in 2010 came to the sad conclusion that the entire Aral region is doomed. “It comes as a shock to be persuaded that human folly and hubris on this monstrous a scale has, in just my lifetime, devastated such a big chunk of Asia. Now only nature and time, probably on a geological scale, have any hope of redeeming it.”

Nevertheless, there is an ongoing effort in Kazakhstan to save and replenish what remains of the northern part of the Aral Sea (the Small Aral). A dam project completed in 2005 has raised the water level of this lake. Salinity has dropped, and fish are again found in sufficient numbers for some fishing to be viable.

The National Geographic reports that before long, "native plants, stifled for years by the saltwater, began to sprout, and migrating birds like pelicans, flamingos, and ducks again began to visit the Aral. Nowadays, “It’s a paradise for birds,” says Russian Academy of Sciences zoologist Nick Aladin, who has been studying the Aral since the 1970s." Sadly, the outlook for the far larger southern part of the sea (the Large Aral) remains bleak.

In the next post we’ll look a little deeper at Job’s reflection on nature and death.

Image Sources:
Abandoned ships - National Geographic
Parched river bed - Wikipedia Commons
Wetland Birds - Unknown