Way out in the wilds of Central Asia, on the
Kazakh-Uzbek border, lies the toxic remains of a dying sea. For thousands of years, this sea was a lifegiver,
bringing food, trade, and civilization. Covering an area the size of Ireland, it was
the fourth largest freshwater lake in the world. But then, in the middle of the 20th Century,
something happened. An irrigation project went wrong, depriving
the sea of vital water. In its place came toxic chemicals, poisons,
and shores of unbreathable dust. Today, the sea is so deadly it’s been called
the Silent Chernobyl. But you likely know it by another name: the
Aral Sea, the Soviet Union’s greatest natural disaster. Beginning in 1948, Moscow diverted water away
from the rivers feeding the sea towards agriculture. The plan was to make Central Asia into a fertile
land of plenty. Instead, it triggered an environmental catastrophe
so staggering we still don’t know it’s true toll. From an ancient oasis to a modern desert ravaged
by cancer-causing storms, this is the story of the Aral Sea… and the bygone empire that
killed it. The Ancient Sea
Two and a half thousand years ago, Alexander the Great stood on the shores of the surging
river, surveying the waters. Behind him lay the vast swathe of land he
and his armies had overrun. Ahead lay an unknown frontier, a wilderness
of tribes and bandits and harsh desert stretching out as far as the eye could see. As Alexander stood at the farthest northern
extent of his ancient empire, little did he know that this wasn’t the end of the world. That the river before him led not to empty
wasteland, but to an expanse of water so vast it dominated the horizon. Today, we know that expanse as the Aral Sea. First appearing some 11,000 years ago, the
existence of the Aral Sea was a pleasing historical mistake. At the very end of the Neogene Period - a
period of time so far back we might as well just call it Long Ago BC - a depression formed
in Central Asia on the border area of modern-day Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. And there it remained for millions of years,
doing nothing but being all low and depressing, until the Amu Darya decided to change course. Since time immemorial, the Amu Darya had flowed
into the vast Caspian Sea to the west. But now it began to flow instead into the
Aral Depression. As it flowed, the depression began to fill
up. Began to look less like a depressing dip in
the landscape… ...and more like a lake. From this chance hydrological event, the Aral
Sea was born. By the time Alexander the Great made it to
the shores of the second river feeding it, the sea was one of the vastest lakes on Earth. You know Lake Biakal in Russia? A lake so famously large that it makes Loch
Ness look like an embarrassing puddle? Well the Aral Sea was over twice the size
of that, and only ever so slightly smaller than Africa’s Lake Victoria. As a result, it drew thousands upon thousands
of peoples to its shorelines, from Tajiks and Uzbeks to Kazakhs, lured in by the promise
of freshwater fish to hunt and islands to colonize. Yep, freshwater. Despite its name, the Aral Sea is not a sea
in the “undrinkable saltwater” sense, but a regular lake with a salinity of around
10g of salt per liter - compared to 35g per liter for your average ocean. Not exactly something you want coming out
your tap, but fresh enough for fish like carp to survive. As for the islands; the Aral Sea is home to
1,000 islands each over 1 hectare in size. The name even comes from the Kyrgyz word Aral-denghiz,
meaning “Sea of Islands.” For ancient peoples, this fish-stuffed, island-filled
sea basically hit the civilization G-Spot. As cultures flourished along its shores, it
became a famous stopping point along the Silk Road. But even in the dim and distant past, it was
clear just how delicate the Aral Sea was. At some point in the Middle Ages, something
happened to one of the two rivers feeding the Sea. We’re still not entirely sure what that
“something” was; if it was human-driven, or related to some external factor. Either way, the result was an apocalyptic
disaster. Shorn of one of its inflows, the Aral Sea
began to dry up. As it dried, it shrank, until entire shoreside
townships were abandoned dozens of kilometers from its waters. With the drying came economic catastrophe. By 1417, court historian Hafizi-Abru was able
to write that the sea no longer existed. Thankfully, this spell of dryness didn’t
last. At some point in the 16th Century, the Aral
Sea began to return. By 1570, documents suggest that it had regained
its full size. It was a historical near-miss, a moment when
the lake was very nearly wiped out. But it was also a warning to the future. A warning that the delicate ecology of the
world’s 4th largest lake could easily be destroyed. Unfortunately, the future wasn’t in the
mood for listening. Here Come the Russians
If there’s a single person you can blame for the destruction of the Aral Sea, it’s
Aleksandr Voeikov. Voeikov was born in 1842, right around the
time Tsar Nicholas I was beginning the wars that would bring the Aral Sea within the Russian
Empire. But Voeikov wasn’t a soldier or a politician. He was a climatologist. One who developed a bizarre dislike for the
Aral Sea. Because the Aral Sea has no outflow and is
instead maintained by evaporation, Voeikov seems to have taken offense to its very existence,
calling it a “useless evaporator,” and a “mistake of nature.” But what could Voeikov do about it? When he died in 1916, the lake remained; an
inarguable fact of nature. But Voeikov’s writings survived. What’s more they influenced a whole generation. A generation who would soon be running the
former Russian Empire. Cut ahead to 1948. In the years after Voeikov died, Imperial
Russia fell, the areas around the Aral Sea tasted independence, and then were absorbed
into the new USSR as the Kazakh and Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republics. Alongside this geopolitical shakeup, Lenin
had died, Stalin had come to power, and decades of state-engineered famines, purges, and other
assorted horrors had wreaked havoc across the empire. And now Stalin wanted to go even further than
bending mere humans to his will. He wanted to mould the landscape itself. The Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature
was the first major Soviet attempt to remake the “non-productive” areas of the empire. “Non-productive” in this case meaning
virgin forests, centers of rural life, or inland seas supporting fishing villages - stuff
you and I might class as “actually really kinda productive”. But Uncle Joe preferred a definition of “productive”
that involved not ordinary people living ordinary lives, but vast plantations making Moscow
rich. And so it was that a network of irrigation
channels began to spring up from the rivers feeding the Aral Sea, diverting water for
growing cotton. Initially, these new Central Asian farms of
“white gold” didn’t effect the rivers much. There was just so much water, how could humans
possibly exhaust it all? And even if they did, who cared? The people running the Soviet Ministry of
Water could all recall Voeikov’s words. If the Aral Sea was a “useless evaporator”
weren’t they justified in putting its water to better use? This toxic attitude prevailed even as Khrushchev
took over after Stalin’s death and launched his own Virgin Lands Campaign. It prevailed even as irrigation channels criss-crossed
Central Asia, diverting so much water that it was a miracle the sea survived. Yet, survive it did. As 1960 dawned, the Aral Sea was in rude health. Stretching 435km north to south, and 290km
east to west, it was the center of vital local economies. Fishing villages dominated its shores. There were wetlands, river deltas, hidden
bays; thriving and irreplaceable ecosystems. Local towns thrived, too, like Aralsk, or
Tastubek - famous for its caviar. Were you to stand on the shorelines back then,
you would’ve watched the fishermen in their boats, watched the children swimming, and
thought to yourself that this was a vista that would last forever. Sadly, that wasn’t the case. By 1960, the Water Ministry knew the Aral
Sea was like a camel with a back so bent its spine was one single straw away from snapping. They could stop digging irrigation ditches
right now, and preserve this perfect balance, maintaining a living lake while also growing
a decent amount of cotton. But “a decent amount” simply wasn’t
enough. The leadership wanted more white gold. Eyes wide open, still loyally quoting Voeikov,
the Ministry of Water demanded yet more channels be dug, yet more flow diverted. Although they knew what they were doing, they
assumed it would take decades for the effects to be felt. Generations, even. They were wrong. The Dying Sea In the summer of 1967, word began to go around
the small Kazakh town of Tastubek that something was wrong. As a center of caviar exports, the locals
were attuned to the ecosystem they worked in. The Aral Sea had been sustaining life here
for centuries. But now something was happening. Almost before their eyes, the residents could
see the waters drawing back, away from the shoreline, leaving the town behind. Those locals had no way of knowing it, but
their town was like a canary lowered into a coalmine to check for leaking gas. And the agonizing death of their economy would
be early warning of the oncoming explosion. Over the next few years, the effects of water
diversion began to become clearer and clearer. By 1973, some of the wetlands and deltas had
vanished, replaced by sandy desert. By 1980, the rivers feeding the sea were starting
to run dry in the summer months, when temperatures soar to 40C. But it was over the next decade that the effects
would really take hold. As the 1980s wore on, the shores of the Aral
Sea retreated. They moved slowly at first, then quicker and
quicker until old fishing villages were stranded two hours’ journey from the nearest fish. As the waters receded, the 1,000 islands the
Sea was famous for stopped being islands, first becoming peninsulas, and then just outcrops
of rock in the midst of desert. One of these former islands was Aralsk-7,
a secret bioweapons facility where Soviet scientists engineered weaponized Plague. As you’ll know if you’ve watched our video
on it, Aralsk-7 had been selected on the assumption that the Aral Sea’s waters would stop its
microscopic nightmares from escaping. And now the sea was gone, leaving nothing
between plague-carrying rats and hundreds of Kazakh villages. By 1987, the drying was so bad that there
was no longer a single Aral Sea. Instead, the waters split in two, creating
a smaller North Aral Sea inside Kazakhstan, and a larger South Aral Sea mostly in Uzbekistan. As these two seas shrank, the salinity of
the water increased, jumping from 10 grams per liter to 110. In this toxic environment, fish began to die
off, leaving entire villages starving. Come 1992, the combined area of the North
and South Aral Seas was only 33,800 km2 - barely half the area they’d once covered. The good news was that, come 1992, the Ministry
of Water was no longer a thing. And neither was the Soviet Union. The USSR had collapsed in 1991, ending the
drive for cotton production in Central Asia. Unfortunately, the successor governments had
all realized they were staring down the barrel of economic ruin without the cotton, and so
kept on growing it. And so, the Sea slowly died. By 2002, the South Aral Sea had subdivided
again, splitting into the East and West Sea. As the 21st Century dawned, towns sustained
by the sea for centuries were now abandoned some 90km from the water. Between them and the receding shore lay nothing
but empty desert spotted with the decaying hulks of abandoned ships. Faced with ruin, the people living around
the Sea abandoned it. Those who could, fled. Those who couldn’t sank into poverty, illness,
and death. Come 2010, the East Aral Sea was barely a
fifth the size it had been in 2002. In 2014, it dried up entirely. In five decades, Soviet mismanagement had
done what Voeikov could never have dreamed of. It had killed the “useless evaporator,”
desiccating the Sea in a way unseen even during the Middle Ages. But it wasn’t just the lack of water that
caused disaster. There’s a reason some refer to the Aral
Sea as the Silent Chernobyl. Like Chernobyl, it was a disaster made of
Soviet incompetence. Like Chernobyl, it left behind a ghost town
- or towns, in this case. And, like Chernobyl, it was a disaster that
could kill you. The Wasteland
In 2015, National Geographic published a series of interviews with locals living around the
ruins of the former Aral Sea. One of them, Yusup Kamalov from the lakeside
region of Karakalpakstan, summed up the devastation as follows:
“This is what the end of the world looks like,” he said, “If we ever have Armageddon,
the people of Karakalpakstan are the only ones who will survive, because we are already
living it.” The Armageddon he was referring to was more
than just visual. Although photos of the dried seabed littered
with dead ships may look strangely beautiful, the reality of living there is anything but. As the sea dried, it left behind ground that
was saturated in salt. While the Soviet water scientists had predicted
it would bake into a hard crust, it instead remained loose, at the whims of the lightest
breeze. The result is salt storms that can blow up
out of nowhere, stinging your eyes and making you feel deathly ill. But the painful concentrations of salt are
just the tip of the iceberg. The dust storms also blow deadly quantities
of DDT, phosalone, and other pesticides. All are known to cause cancer after prolonged
exposure, plus all manner of other nasty illnesses. In the years of the dead Aral Sea, cancer
rates around Karakalpakstan have shot to 25 times the world average. Those who escape cancer are felled by respiratory
diseases, immune system disorders, and antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. In short, the air around the Aral Sea is toxic
to breathe. And even those who escape these deadly dust
storms suffer. So many chemicals have been dumped into the
area, sunk to the bottom of the waters long ago, that every part of the food chain has
become contaminated. If you want a single, depressing statistic
to sum up the danger of living in this remote corner of the world, you should know that
infant mortality rates here are some of the highest on Earth - growing steadily since
the ‘70s even as they drop in the rest of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. All in all, it’s a disaster area. A place inimical to human life. And it gets worse. When the Sea vanished, the effect on the local
climate was beyond comprehension. From somewhere that experienced relatively
mild weather, the Aral Depression has become somewhere that the weather Gods seem to have
taken a personal dislike to. Nowadays, temperatures swinging wildly between
-40C and plus 40C are not uncommon, blasting and burning this once-fertile land into a
lifeless desert. It this hostile world, one of the few things
that seems capable of surviving is the Bubonic Plague, which occasionally causes minor outbreaks. While we’re not definitely tying the ongoing
existence of the Black Death in the Aral Sea region to the abandoned Soviet bioweapons
lab working on the plague right nearby, we are saying it’s a spooky coincidence. And that, really, is the Aral Sea today. A forgotten, toxic world festering in Central
Asia, where all that remains of a once-great lake are devastated towns and sick and penniless
people. According to scientists, the chances of the
Uzbek East Sea ever replenishing in our lifetimes are vanishingly remote. The Aral Sea, it seems, is dead. At least, in Uzbekistan it is. Earlier, we mentioned that when the Aral Sea
first divided, the North Sea wound up in Kazakhstan, and the south in Uzbekistan. While the unfolding disaster has continued
unabated in Uzbekistan, the same cannot be said for its northern neighbor. Unlikely as it seems, our video today isn’t
just a story of environmental degradation and despair, although there has been plenty
of that. It’s also a story of hope. Time for us to venture upwards at last to
the North Aral Sea, where the decades of destruction haven’t just been stopped. They’ve been actively reversed. Hope Springs Eternal
If you’d surveyed the North Aral Sea in 1994, chances are you’d have predicted a
complete collapse in the next few years. At that point, the North Aral Sea was drying
even faster than the South Aral Sea. And a meeting that year between Kazakhstan,
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan on preserving the two rivers feeding
it had amounted to nothing. But while things would get worse over the
next decade, they would also soon start to get better. In the early 2000s, Kazakhstan presented the
World Bank with a plan for combating the North Aral Sea’s decline. With the Sea’s catastrophic death headline
news at the time, the World Bank handed over $87m, likely expecting it would help slow
the decline and nothing more. But, to everyone’s surprise, the Kazakhs
instead managed to save their sea. The first step was to completely sever the
North Aral Sea from the South. Until the mid-2000s, a narrow channel ran
between the two, filtering water down from Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan. The Kazakh government decided that, rather
than let both seas die, they’d sacrifice one to save the other. A vast dyke known as the Kokaral dam was built
across the channel, trapping the North Sea’s waters in Kazakhstan. At the same time, a massive cleanup operation
was launched along the Syr Darya River - the same river Alexander the Great had stood beside,
many centuries before. When the work was completed in 2005, scientists
thought it might take ten years to replenish the North Aral Sea. To everyone’s shock, the water level rose
3.3m in seven months. As the North Aral Sea slowly refilled, its
salinity levels began to drop. Shores that had been salt-swept desert sank
once more beneath the waves. The waters got closer and closer again to
the old fishing villages. As the 2010s got underway, the Kazakh government
decided to try reintroducing fish that had died when the salinity levels went through
the roof. Not only did the fish survive. They thrived. Around the same time that the East Aral Sea
was vanishing from existence, the North Aral Sea reopened to fishermen. Villagers who’d last caught fish in the
1980s returned to the water for the first time in decades. Sons of those fishermen who’d only ever
known a life of grinding poverty had their first experiences in a boat. From a dead industry, fishing in the North
Aral Sea once again became a viable way to make a living. You can see the effects most clearly in the
town of Aralsk. A one-time port city, Aralsk slumped into
decline in the 1980s as the disaster took hold. In the depths of the crisis, this fishing
town found itself stuck 150km from sea so salty no fish could live in it. By 2018 - the closest date we could get accurate
figures for - the waters had returned to just 17km from the edge of town. With the water came bream, pike-perch, and
flounder. From abandoning all hope, the older generation
now truly believes they will live to see the day the waters return to Aralsk’s docks. But for that to happen, a few more miracles
still have to take place. While the North Aral Sea is today thriving,
it has also grown back as far as it currently can. The Kokaral dam is too small to hold any more
water back, with the result that billions of cubic meters are now lost every year. It’s estimated that merely adding another
4 meters’ height to the dyke would retain enough water to allow the North Aral Sea to
regrow by another 400 km2. Enough to perhaps at last turn Aralsk back
into a thriving port. At time of writing, there was no deadline
for this expansion. The Kazakh government was giving nothing more
than vague words of commitment to the project. But hopefully it will happen soon. Hopefully the elderly fishermen in Aralsk
will be able to see their Sea once more, lapping at the docks, as alive as they remember it
once being. If that happened… well. It might just qualify as a miracle. The story of the Aral Sea, then, is actually
two separate stories: one about the Toxic Soviet Sea turning into desert; and one about
the Reborn Sea to its north. But more than that, it’s a tale about choices. About how we can look at habitat destruction
and environmental degradation, and choose to either turn a blind eye and accept the
worst; or to dig our heels in, grit our teeth, and do something about it - no matter what
the cost. The recovery of the North Aral Sea hasn’t
been easy, and it’s still a long way from where it once was. But hope has returned, bringing with it a
glimpse of a better future. And if we can save a sea as contaminated and
degraded as the Aral Sea… Then maybe, just maybe, there’s hope for
the rest of our world too.
