Word of the Day
Aral (AHR-uhl)
Common clues: Shrinking Asian body of water
The Aral Sea is an endorheic inland sea in Central Asia; it lies between Kazakhstan in the north and Karakalpakstan, an autonomous region of Uzbekistan, in the south. Since the 1960s, the Aral Sea has been shrinking, as the rivers that feed it were diverted by the USSR for irrigation. The Aral Sea is badly polluted, largely as the result of weapons testing, industrial projects, and fertilizer runoff before the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The major ecological problem is that diversion of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers for irrigation has shrunk the Aral Sea dramatically; the Aral Sea has been drying up for about 40 years. This has brought about a number of ecological problems both for the sea and for the surrounding area.
Used
with permission: Rainer Ressl, Deutschen
Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt
See animation of Aral Sea's desiccation at: http://www.dfd.dlr.de/app/land/aralsee/
The Soviet Union decided in 1918 that the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea—the Amu Darya in the south and the Syr Darya in the northeast—would be diverted for irrigating the desert in order to grow rice, melons, cereal, and, above all, cotton; this was part of the Soviet plan for cotton, or "white gold," to become a major export. (This did eventually end up becoming the case, and even today Uzbekistan is one of the world's biggest exporters of cotton.)
The sea's surface area has now shrunk by approximately 60 percent, and its volume by almost 80 percent. Over the same time period, the salinity of the Aral Sea has increased from about 10 g/l to about 45 g/l.
The ecosystem of the Aral Sea and the river deltas feeding into it has been nearly destroyed, not least because of the much higher salinity. The land around the Aral Sea is also heavily polluted, and the people living in the area are suffering from a lack of fresh water, as well as from a number of other health problems—the receding sea has left huge plains covered with salt and toxic chemicals, which are picked up, carried away by the wind as toxic dust, and spread to the surrounding area; the population around the Aral Sea now shows high rates of certain forms of cancer and lung diseases, as well as other diseases. Crops in the region are also destroyed by salt being deposited onto the land. The town of Moynaq in Uzbekistan had at one point a thriving harbor and fishing industry employing approximately 60,000 people; now the town lies miles from the shore. Fishing boats lie scattered on dry land that was once covered by water; many of them have been there for 20 years.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html). It uses material from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea.
|
|