At the start of
the 1960s, the Aral Sea was the world’s fourth largest inland sea.
Located between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, it covered 26,254 square
miles (68,000 square kilometres) before a major Soviet Union irrigation
project diverted water from two sources, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya
rivers. It is widely believed that this saline lake in the desert could
not be sustained without those waters, not surprising since it had gone
dry in its distant past. Today, the shore of the once great lake has
receded by about 75 miles (120 kilometres).
Peter Annin took a photo (top) of the boats now far from the reduced
water of the Aral Sea (see the October 2008 satellite image, above.) “It
was really quite an extraordinary experience to stand on the bottom of
what had once been a great lake trying to imagine what the ecosystem
was like before,” he says. MODERATE RESOLUTION IMAGING SEPCTRORADIOMETER RAPID RESPONSE SYSTEM / NASA
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Peter Annin, author of The Great Lakes Water Wars,
visited some communities in Uzbekistan to see what happens to a
water-based culture without water. “Their economy, culture and society
was intimately interwoven with the local water-based ecosystem. We had
generations upon generations of fishermen. There were septuagenarian
and octogenarian fisherman who still couldn’t believe what had happened
to this inland sea … that had so defined their lives with. In fishing
families, their children couldn’t grow up to be fishermen anymore. So
they had to go away or find another job. You had these former seaside
people completely landlocked in the desert now. And they still had a
fishermen’s collective. These men with calloused hands and sun-wrinkled
skin, I listened to them wax poetic (about fishing days) then slide
into a befuddled and almost disbelieving depression about what’s been
lost.
“What was an interesting surprise to me
was that, like the Great Lakes, the weather patterns were intimately
wedded to the Aral Sea.” It’s a desert ecosystem, but was cooler by the
sea. Now the once shoreside communities suffer blistering temperatures
in summer and colder high-desert winters. In addition, land once under
water, which had become contaminated with the heavy fertilizers and
other chemical runoffs, suddenly were dry, exposed soil that let
pollutants become airborne. The drier air and harsh winds increased
respiratory problems for the communities.
“Now that the Soviet Union has crumbled,
there’s more admission that the irrigation is a problem, but now
they’re continuing to irrigate because they need the western currency
that the cotton crop brings.” The situation is now an unsustainable
spiral because the remaining water becomes increasing saline, changing
the soil that it irrigates and eventually making it unfarmable.
Could such a thing happen here? First,
Lake Superior is not in a desert system, although its narrow watershed
is considered small for the size of lake it sustains. In 2008, the U.S.
president signed into law the Great Lakes Basin Compact, first passed
by all eight states bordering the lakes, to protect this unique
freshwater system from major diversions outside the basin. The two
Canadian provinces beside the Great Lakes system adopted a companion
agreement. |
