Aral Sea Disappearing

W33dz writes "The BBC is reporting today that the Aral Sea on the border of the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan has lost half its size and 75% of its volume in the last 15 years. The article includes some stunning pictures from both NASA and the new European Space Agency's Envisat satellite. This seems especially poignant since the US Government is hosting a summit on a proposed International Earth Observation System in Washington this month (BBC article). The meeting is intended to defend much of the Bush Administration's environmental policy and has an amazing guest list filled with the Who's Who of US politics."

Comments

If it's a natural.....

[Creepy Crawler]

Dissappearance, why stop it? There's a lot of things we dont know about nature and ecological climates.

For all we know, this could be based on the 13000 year cycle of the earth.

Re:If it's a natural.....

[turgid]

For all we know, this could be based on the 13000 year cycle of the earth.

If oonly it were. The article says that it's more likely to be due to the excessive and wasteful irrigation systems in the area which take water from the rivers that supply the sea.

Re: If it's a natural.....

[Red Rocket]

That, and the flow is very reduced by that lil thing we call the Hoover Dam.

...and that bizarre freak-show called Las Vegas where every casino competes with every other one to see how much water they can waste.

Pardon me?

[Otter]

This seems especially poignant...The meeting is intended to defend much of the Bush Administration's environmental policy and has an amazing guest list filled with the Who's Who of US politics.

Errr, not to nitpick but the Soviet governments that were responsible for the disastrous irrigation projects in Central Asia were led by Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. The current Bush administration had very little to do with it.

Re:Pardon me?

[Fly]

I don't think the point is that Bush is responsible for it but that Bush has the view that we don't need to worry about messing up the environment when the Aral Sea shows that we can very well mess it up. The comparison is between Bush and those who are responsible for the environmental death of the Aral Sea.

Huh? Blame the Bush administration?

[kawika]

If anything, the Aral Sea situation shows that these issues are not as simple as environmental extremists would like to make them out to be. Farmers need water. As the article says, their irrigation systems are not efficient, but who will pay for a new one? Perhaps the farmers should be made to pay for such a system, and maybe they should even compensate the fishermen who have lost their livelihoods. But answers that are acceptable to all sides are not so no-brainer obvious.

Re:"Leaky Irrigation" In A Watershed?

[duffbeer703]

It's very plausible.

It's basically a matter of spreading water over a larger surface area.

eg. Leave a cup of water out, and pour another cup of water on a large baking sheet. Water on the baking sheet is exposed to more air and thus will evaporate faster.

Here are some resources that you should find interesting: (remove the space that /. adds)

Ground Water Budgets
http://water.usgs.gov/pubs/circ/circ1186/ html/gw_d ev.html

50% of Maine rainfall evaporates
http://wa.water.usgs.gov/news/news.wri r01-4110.htm l

water.usgs.gov contains all sorts of interesting climate information.