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Aral Sea Basin Almost Completely Dry
An anonymous reader writes: In 2000, NASA began taking satellite images of the Aral Sea in central Asia, which was once the fourth-largest inland lake in the world. At that time, there was an expansive eastern basin, and smaller basins to the north and west. In images recorded just last week, we see that the eastern basin is completely gone, and the western basin just a thin strip of water. The local fishing industry has been devastated, old ship graveyards now rest on dry ground, and salt-heavy sand is being blown around the region, causing health issues.
Most of the lake's decline is attributable to human intervention: "In the 1950s, two of the region's major rivers – the Amu Darya and and the Syr Darya – were diverted by the Soviet government to provide irrigation for cotton production in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, starving the Aral. It has been diminishing ever since, with the sea level dropping 16 meters between 1960 and 1996, according to the World Bank. Water levels are believed to be down to less than 10 per cent of what they were five decades ago." Low levels of rain and snow didn't help.
Most of the lake's decline is attributable to human intervention: "In the 1950s, two of the region's major rivers – the Amu Darya and and the Syr Darya – were diverted by the Soviet government to provide irrigation for cotton production in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, starving the Aral. It has been diminishing ever since, with the sea level dropping 16 meters between 1960 and 1996, according to the World Bank. Water levels are believed to be down to less than 10 per cent of what they were five decades ago." Low levels of rain and snow didn't help.
Too many meatbags on this Earth. Lake/river water has to be diverted for farming for all the people. There won't be any water left before you know it.
The Soviet Union is dead 15 years ago. The situation has progressively gotten worse as MORE, not less water was diverted.
The current fuckup has little to do with what the Soviet Union's master plan was in 1960s and can be blamed 100% on what people continued to do in more recent years.
Anyway, just read the wikipedia page on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
The old Soviet Union did enough ecological damage without having to hang that subject on it...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
If you think about it, The Great Salt Lake is staring at the same issue (albeit on a longer timescale).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The only good part about this is that it is theoretically reversible, although politically that's probably not going to happen because there are a lot of people who depend on the diverted water.
I read the internet for the articles.
What a shame. All this destruction for a few years worth of money. I suppose we're getting what we deserve, anyway.
Read Atimatov's book and you will get a feeling for what splendor the Aral Sea was.
And just so recently do to human avarice has it been utterly destroyed.
The hard questions now are:
How much money has been drained away in restoration efforts to date?
How much money will be drained away in more failed restoration efforts?
We just keep taking and giving only poison back.
This is just more proof we do not deserve to be curators of this fantastic place.
Humans are hideous and ignorant not by nature, but by pure choice.
No, that's only the nearly statewide class 4 drought that has hit California.
You know, the one that made it illegal to wait for you water to heat up.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.g...
Quite startling, how the water levels change. But read the article to see why this is happening, and where it's going. It seems it doesn't take a "totalitarian government" to do stupid, short-sighted things. But hey, enjoy your golf at Vegas, hear? And the water shows.
Looking at what?
Subliminal thought?
I'm sure it's economically impractical, but it strikes me that filling some of the worlds emptying water basins by towing large antarctic icebergs to a nearby port and then breaking them up for shipment is a win-win scenario.
Obvious downside: fossil fuel use to get water where it is most useful may exacerbate the problem over time.
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!
"Are you looking at saggy tribal titties again, Anon?"
"No, mommy, I'm looking at -flip flip flip- the Aral Sea."
Trolling is a art,
The same thing is happening to Mono Lake in California. The city of Los Angeles has been diverting the streams that feed the lake for decades and it's slowly drying up.
Not too long ago some tectonic events raised the land under Gibraltar and the Med was cut off from the Atlantic. Turns out, the freshwater flows from rivers into the Med is nowhere near enough to sustain its current size. Without a water connection to the Atlantic, the Mediterranean Sea dried up.
It can happen again at any time. The Mediterranean's existence is always in danger.
(and no, carbon emissions and AGW had nothing to do with it)
And your kids will be able to read about the same thing happening to Lake Mead if things don't change :-(
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Cotton is an extremely water-intensive crop. Until quite recently it was pushed on developing economies as an "export crop" for industrialized agriculture, replacing local food prodcution. This has generally been a disaster. For water-poor countries, growing cotton for export amounts to exporting expensive water to water-rich countires.
Diverting water for agriculture simply makes no sense. It is cheaper and more efficient to import the end product.
That is a reasonable and nuanced position that clearly required you to think about the issue at hand... are you new here? (Clearly not given your UID but it's the traditional joke to make.)
And NASA have been taking satellite images of it since a bit before 2000 too. E.g. 1977
Organized, structured, large scale farming does less ecological and environmental harm than the people those farms would feed instead scrounging for food or running ad-hoc microfarms.
Can you provide citations for this?
This is happening to too many lakes around the world. I visited Brazil this past August, and while visiting family, someone wanted to show me something.
We got in the car and drove to a lake/reservoir, one of the largest in Brazil (Represa de Furnas). I had been there before, and knew what it was supposed to look like. We arrived, and drove out past the normal shoreline, and onward about a half mile before we reached the lake's current extent.
It's truly shocking in person - and to start putting this together with the Aral Sea, and all of the others that have been mentioned - it sure makes me feel like something BIG and BAD is happening, even if no one knows it yet.
We went to another location on the Represa de Furnas, where we ate at a restaurant where the building is normally being lapped by waves. After I ate, I went down to the current level of the shore and took pictures of where the water should be - about 30 feet over my head.
Keep in mind, this is not a puddle either - 1440 square kilometers (3500 km perimeter) - and the level is down like 10 meters. It's unreal. I won't try the math, but billions of gallons short sounds plausible.
I don't know what's going to happen, but these problems are much closer to the surface than many imagine.
Burning Man Uzbekistan 2015!
Build your camp in one of our rusting ship hulks laying on the playa!
2 things to note: Represa de Furnas is a reservoir -- which didn't exist until man created it in 1957. The Aral Sea is a natural feature, and to give some perspective on how much water was diverted, one could transfer all the water from Lake Erie and Lake Ontario (Great Lakes) and still not refill it...
Lake Mead is an artificial lake, created by the construction of the Hoover Dam. With the presence of that dam its size can be regulated. Creation of the lake was a byproduct of the benefits of having the dam, not the specific intent of the project in the first place.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Not quite but if they rebuilt the canals using concrete instead of sand it would retore part of the lake.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Changing rainfall patterns, climate variability, high levels of evaporation, reduced snow melt runoff, and current water use patterns are putting pressure on water management resources at Lake Mead as the population relying on it for water and the Hoover Dam for electricity continues to increase. A 2008 paper in Water Resources Research states that at current usage allocation and projected climate trends, there is a 50% chance that live storage in lakes Mead and Powell will be gone by 2021, and that the reservoir could drop below minimum power pool elevation of 1,050 feet (320 m) as early as 2017. Although water levels in the lake rose by more than 30 ft (9.1 m) in 2011 due to a rainy winter and increased snowfall in the Rocky Mountains,[15] it appears highly unlikely that the prevailing pattern of drought will change to precipitation surcharge in a time frame shorter than that in which the lake level will fall below the dead storage level of the downstream diversion and hydro-power intake tunnels.
There's worse, if you google "lake mead drying up."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The intent of the project was to ensure a constant water flow. A big reservoir is a prerequisite for that.
I'd say the number of comments on this article proves that it is of interest to geeks. Do you think geeks should be uninterested in the goings on in the world?
Actually, there are many of these bodies of water around (prehistoric endorheic basins including the Caspian Sea and the Great Salt Lake). But I think the Aral sea situation is more akin to the Salton Sea... The Salton and the Aral sea are that have recently had their replenishing flows restricted by agriculture.
The number of comments just proves that number of people who read about this in mainstream media several days ago when it was trending on Facebook but who had to wait for Slashdot to catch up to the trend before they could say anything about it that someone else might read.
The fact that it is trending on Facebook this week proves something else, which is that most people think the Aral Sea is a big circle as shown on most world maps and globes and had no idea that the Soviets had diverted its main sources, leading to its shrinkage, about 50 years ago. I admit that I suffered the same ignorance, although I learned about this a few years ago before it was cool and I suspect that I am not the only one whose sole surprise from this story is that it is so popular to talk about this week all the sudden.
The use of the term "inland lake" in the summary proves that no nerds were even involved in getting this article onto Slashdot's front page. A real nerd would not distinguish between inland lakes and all of those lakes in the middle of the ocean.
And let's not forget what the City of Los Angeles did to Owens Lake. " ... in 2013, it is the largest single source of dust pollution in the United States."
Beware of the Redittor who loans you a Sharpie.
Just blow up the diversion made by the sovjets and let the rivers flow it's original course..
No mom, I am looking at those little cute birds...
Always two sides to every story. The opposite, yet similar situation is when rivers are dammed up for hydro power, this usually "destroys" the land behind it with flooding to form a reservoir. In extreme examples like the diversion above which are monumental engineering feats you have the huge dam in China that swallowed up huge tracts of land including whole villages. Again, measured negative VS positive...
Even in smaller situations you have issues with wildlife ecology destruction, and native issues... There will never be projects like this without impact.
The pertinent question is more, was it done well, and were their unforeseen outcomes (like toxic dust from the salt flats).
"Are you looking at saggy tribal titties again, Anon?"
"No, mommy, I'm looking at -fap fap fap- the Aral Sea."
Of course that only lasted until I discovered you could subscribe your parents to magazines without them knowing and the Victoria Secrets started showing up.
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.