Once the fourth largest lake in the world, Central Asia's shrinking Aral Sea
has reached a new low, thanks to decades-old water diversions for
irrigation and a more recent drought.
Satellite imagery released this
week by NASA shows that the eastern basin of the freshwater body is now
completely dry.
Oct 2, 2014
The Aral Sea (/ˈærəl/)[4] was an endorheic lake (one with no outflow) lying between Kazakhstan (Aktobe and Kyzylorda Regions) in the north and Uzbekistan (Karakalpakstan autonomous region) in the south. The name roughly translates as "Sea of Islands", referring to over 1,100 islands that had dotted its waters; in the Turkic languages aral means "island, archipelago". The Aral Sea drainage basin encompasses Uzbekistan and parts of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and Iran.[1]
Formerly the fourth-largest lake in the world with an area of 68,000 km2 (26,300 sq mi), the Aral Sea has been shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects. By 1997, it had declined to 10% of its original size, splitting into four lakes – the North Aral Sea, the eastern and western basins of the once far larger South Aral Sea, and one smaller intermediate lake.[5] By 2009, the southeastern lake had disappeared and the southwestern lake had retreated to a thin strip at the western edge of the former southern sea; in subsequent years, occasional water flows have led to the southeastern lake sometimes being replenished to a small degree.[6] Satellite images taken by NASA in August 2014 revealed that for the first time in modern history the eastern basin of the Aral Sea had completely dried up.[7] The eastern basin is now called the Aralkum Desert.
In an ongoing effort in Kazakhstan to save and replenish the North Aral Sea, a
(source: http://www.envis.maharashtra.gov)
Most of the changes in climate and landscape in the Aral Sea basin that we are about to explore are at the least indirect products of Human induced changes. While we must remember at all times that society is responsible for the crisis that has unfolded in and around the Aral, the point we want to make is that most of the actual changes that have afflicted the Sea since the 1960s are the result of our environment’s reaction to the stresses society has imposed on it. Thus, the difficulty lies as much in understanding the way climate and other natural systems function as in being capable of weighing the potential consequences of our actions before we undertake them. Risk assessment combined with scientific understanding should undercut our actions more efficiently; adding an ethical dimension to the equation remains more than welcome in addition to those more accessible and quantifiable factors, but is too fragile to be the centerpiece on which our decisions rely before we commit to large scale actions which can often, as we are about to see, engender even larger responses from our environment.
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(source: http://www.geography.hunter.cuny.edu)
(source:www.nationalgeographic.com)
(source: http://eartfocus.typepad.com)
(source:www.nationalgeographic.com)
(source: http://eartfocus.typepad.com)
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