Posts Tagged ‘Nukus’
Week 66: Heating Up
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From Nukus we headed north to indulge in a little disaster tourism. For all the things we read about the Aral Sea, actually seeing its remains gave us a fuller appreciation of the scale of the environmental disaster. The thing that’s most striking is how big it still is. Even after so many years of shrinking there’s still a large area of water, which made me appreciate just how massive it was to start with. Back in the early 60’s, before the water started receding, it was the world’s fourth largest lake, 400km across at its longest point and 280km at its widest. It was home to fish stocks that supported a fishing industry of 60,000 people, mainly in Moynaq (Uzbekistan) and Aralsk (Kazakhstan). Unfortunately, the Soviet planners wanted to expand agriculture in the area, and particularly production of cotton to supply the textile industry. They dug irrigation canals to tap the water of the Amu-Darya and Syr Darya rivers and by the 1980’s the flow into the Aral Sea was less than one tenth of levels in the 1950’s. But the Aral Sea had already started to dry up in the mid 1960’s. According to the Lonely Planet, water levels fell more than 16m between 1966 and 1993, though our guide told us the current water depth is 48m lower than the original.
That’s the other thing that shocked us – the water is still dropping. At the lake shore near where we camped there was a pontoon lying on the salt-encrusted shore, at least 5m from the water. Apparently it was in the water in August 2008, refuelling boats that were buzzing around looking for oil. Looking way back to the plateau we were camped on, the water would have stretched all the way to the cliffs, and in 1983 still had a depth of 12m. And yet cotton growing is still being encouraged. So much so that university students in the area are put to work picking cotton for four months of the academic year.