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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."
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.
Stick Men
Sir, you are lacking in the uninformed reactionary spirit that made this land so great!
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.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
This was when George W Bush was working for his dad on a secret CIA project back in 1986.
Not wanting to commit things to paper and have them get out through the Freedom of Information Act, the planning went around by word of mouth. Dick Cheney (fresh back from a mission to pollute the canals on Mars) wanted to tell Bush Jr over the phone to get rid of the CCCP (Russian acronym for USSR).
However, the phone cut off mid-conversation, and all Bush could hear Cheney say was "About Russia? I want you to get rid of the C..."
Bush took this partial instruction literally, and proceeded to eliminate the smaller of Russia's internal salt seas.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The Central US will be running out of water in the next 50 to 100 years because of irrigation. Right now, farmers from Texas to the Dakotas get their water from deep aquifers. The problem is that these aquifers were filled by meltwater from the last ice age and are no longer being replenished. Within the next 50 to 100 years, that water will be gone. Plans are already being discussed to divert the Missouri, Mississippi, and Arkansas rivers so that their waters can be used to continue irrigation in America's breadbasket. This could have devistating effects on water supplies and ecosystems downstream.
Smeghead every day of the week.
That, and the flow is very reduced by that lil thing we call the Hoover Dam.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
We're going to divert rivers. We're going to alter the natural habitats of pretty much all life on the planet. Animal species will go extinct (unless we take the time to specifically preserve each and every one). We're going to change the mixture of gases in the air...
At some point, everyone is going to have to come to grips with this. The Earth can't support this many people and still exist in it's "Natural" state. The hard part is not screwing it totally up and ending up with a toxic environment.
Eventually, the land's all going to be either populated area (city / suburb), agricultural, or a managed wildlife "park".
> Is the irrigation surrounding the rivers taking the water out of the sea's watershed? Seems unlikely. The water would just eventually run back into the river and the sea.
No, much irrigation water is lost to evaporation or to incorporation into the crops.
Remember that crops, like most other life-forms, are mostly water. So for those little seeds turn into railcar-loads of consumables, all that water has to come from somewhere. Irrigation converts flowing water into money.
Also, some kinds of irrigation are extremely wasteful in terms of evaporation. Next time you drive through Texas under a blazing sun and see all those endless acres of rice shoots submerged under 6" of water, ask yourself what the evaporation rate must be. The lakes behind big dams also greatly increase the evaporation rate in a drainage system.
And though what goes up eventually comes down, it might come down half a continent away.
> I mean, how is water leaking from a poorly-built irrigation system different from the rain that falls right next to it and feeds the rivers and the sea to begin with?
In general terms, it is distributed differently, which means it can behave differently w.r.t. evaporation etc.
To make up an illustrative example, suppose you water your lawn to a total of 10" over 10 months, just a little bit every night. Not much runs off, right? But if you get a 10" rain over a couple of days it stacks up faster than it can be absorbed or evaporate, so most of it runs downhill into streams that feed the sea.
Surely that's not precisely what's happening in Central Asia, but it should call attention to the fact that the way water is distributed in space and time can have a big effect on where it ends up.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
How did they make the desert bloom?
The most important innovation in coping with scarce water supplies has been drip irrigation. This method of irrigation applies water and nutrients directly to the root of the plant at a controlled rate. See the drip irrigation pipelines. With traditional irrigation, most of the water evaporates from the ditch and is wasted. Drip irrigation uses less water, works with saline water, requires less fertilizer, and produces more crops.
It was invented in 1965 and has been used all over the world. If those former Soviet republics aren't using it, I suspect the reason is that they don't think they can afford to pay for the equipment. I would say that perhaps they can't afford not to pay for it.
You think wars for oil are bad?
Wait until there are wars for water.
People can live without oil. They may not want to (what would happen to the US without oil?), but they can. Water, however, is a different story.
I've seen an incredible number of stories about water, water shortages, fights over water rights and irrigation, and such in the past year. As the population of the Earth continues to rise, so does the demand for water. Many of the water supplies currently being used are already being used faster than they can replenish - and they're only going to get more use.
Eventually areas are going to start having serious water shortages.
The most wasteful country in the world in terms of water? No suprise, the US. The combination of all the endless golf courses, which is the #1 use of water in the US IIRC, and all those suburban laws, especially in areas they're not supposed to be growing such as the Southwest, and incredible amounts of water are being taken from rivers and aquifers for pretty silly purposes.
I wonder how long until serious money starts being spent on how to make cost efficient desalinization of ocean water, and better pumping to get the water from coasts to inland. Because there aren't going to be enough sources elsewhere to supply all the water needs at the rate things are going.
So much water on the planet, and still there seems to not be enough...
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
The Aral sea used to be the 4th largest lake in the world. (Quick quiz: name the top 3.) It's now the 12th largest. (Slower quiz: name the intervening 8.)
Not only has it lost half its surface area since 1985, it seems to have lost two thirds since 1960. outlines are interesting. I wonder what it's like on that island that's almost a peninsula.
And while this has little to do with global warming, it's a prescient example of significant human-caused environmental change.
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