Nearly twice as large as Switzerland, the Aral Sea was still among the four largest ones on the planet in 1960. Unfortunately, overreliance on its tributaries Amu Darya and Sry Daria for agriculture has dried it up. Actually, it’s exactly what plans made by the former USSR had predicted, since the resulting marshes were to be used for rice culture. Now only 17,000 km², the Aral Sea is but a big pond. The boats that had previously played an important role in the region’s economic prosperity now lie still in the sand like beached whales. The desert of salt that has replaced it is a hostile, unusable land. And yet not everybody has given up – fishermen, farmers, biologists, and even a few pirates still believe the sea can rise again. They all fight for a better tomorrow.
Runtime:
01:22:00
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Yes
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Aral Sea, Kazakh Aral Tengizi, Uzbek Orol Dengizi, a once-large saltwater lake of Central Asia.
It straddles the boundary between Kazakhstan to the north and Uzbekistan to the south.
The shallow Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth largest body of inland water. The remnants of it nestle in the climatically inhospitable heart of Central Asia, to the east of the Caspian Sea.
The Aral Sea and its demise are of great interest and increasing concern to scientists because of the remarkable shrinkage of its area and volume that began in the second half of the 20th century—when the region was part of the Soviet Union—and continued into the 21st. That change resulted primarily because of the diversion (for purposes of irrigation) of the riverine waters of the Syr Darya
(ancient Jaxartes River) in the north and the Amu Darya (ancient Oxus River) in the south, which discharged into the Aral Sea and were its main sources of inflowing water.
Nearly twice as large as Switzerland, the Aral Sea was still among the four largest ones on the planet in 1960. Unfortunately, overreliance on its tributaries Amu Darya and Sry Daria for agriculture has dried it up. Actually, it’s exactly what plans made by the former USSR had predicted, since the resulting marshes were to be used for rice culture. Now only 17,000 km², the Aral Sea is but a big pond. The boats that had previously played an important role in the region’s economic prosperity now lie still in the sand like beached whales. The desert of salt that has replaced it is a hostile, unusable land. And yet not everybody has given up – fishermen, farmers, biologists, and even a few pirates still believe the sea can rise again. They all fight for a better tomorrow.
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