Why Russia Destroyed the World's 4th Biggest Lake

for most of human history the Errol sea in Central Asia was the fourth largest lake in the world at about the same size as the U.S state of West Virginia the only three that were larger than it were Lake Victoria and Africa Lake Superior and North America and of course the Caspian Sea directly next door to it in Eurasia but then in the 1960s a series of decisions taken by the Soviet Union began to destroy the Aral Sea and over the decades ever since it has been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking at the current time now in the 2020s what little remains of the Aral Sea is less than 10 of its original size back before the 1960s while more than 95 percent of its original water volume has simply disappeared for all intents and purposes the arrow sea has died and the relatively sudden disappearance of a lake this large here has carried with it profound and unforeseen consequences that are pushing the entire region of Central Asia towards Calamity and War it is without exaggeration the greatest way the map of the Earth has changed in recent history and the worst environmental catastrophe of the past hundred years and it was entirely 100 engineer to happen by Mankind's own arrogance before the 1960s the Aral Sea had existed here within the dry steps of Central Asia for thousands of years its location in nearly the center of the Eurasian continent meant that it was located in an area with very little rainfall and surrounded by deserts with nearly 1500 kilometers between the lake and the nearest body of oceanic water in the Black Sea as a result only about a fifth of the Aral Seas water supply ever actually came from rainfall and that meant that the remaining four-fifths of its water supply came entirely just from the two Mighty rivers of Central Asia that fed it the amudaria that begins in the pamir mountains of modern day Tajikistan and the sear Daria beginning in the tianchon mountains of modern day Kyrgyzstan naturally being located in the middle of a desert the arrow sea suffered from a high rate of evaporation but for most of its history the Seas evaporation rate was roughly equal to the same amount of water that flowed into it from the rivers and the limited rainfall a delicate balance of equilibrium between evaporation and water inflow existed here for centuries and thus the season existence was present across most of human history and almost always defined local geopolitics it formed the westernmost Frontier of the advancing Chinese Tang Dynasty in the 8th century and became the frontier of the advancing Russian Empire A Thousand Years Later by the 20th century the entirety of Central Asia including the Aral Sea was dominated by the Soviet Union in the 1930s Joseph Stalin introduced a new program in the country called the Great transformation of nature involving the Soviets reworking and reshaping their nature in their geography to better suit their Agriculture and Industry by the early 1960s under the Khrushchev Administration the great transformation of nature had turned its eye towards reshaping the geography of Soviet Central Asia the plan was to build out a vast system of canals that would divert water from the amudharya and surdaria rivers and irrigate large stretches of new Farmland across the desert steps of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan new Farms that would primarily be growing with the Soviets were calling white gold cotton and by the 1970s their Central age project had gotten even more dire in 1973 on the other side of Eurasia Egypt went to war with Israel during the Yom Kippur War Egypt lost the war and they agreed to a peace treaty with Israel exchanging their own diplomatic recognition of the Israeli State for the territorial return of their Sinai Peninsula and in doing so firmly switched sides in the Cold War from the Soviet Camp over to the Western Camp by 1977 the Soviets had quit selling their weapons to Egypt and the Egyptians retaliated by suspending all of their massive cotton exports to the Soviets and in response to that the Soviets chose to double down on their transformation of nature in Central Asia to more favor their own domestic cotton production and for a time it actually worked really well by 1988 the Uzbek SSR all on its own was the largest exporter of cotton in the world helped tremendously by the soviet-made irrigation canals diverting water from the AMU and ciradario rivers but the high price for this abundance of cotton production in the middle of the desert was already beginning to become apparent because as the arrow sea was already shrinking remember that four-fifths of the Arrow's water supply came from the almudaria and Sir Daria Rivers by diverting water from both of them to feed new cotton plantations across Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan the Soviets were depriving that water from reaching the arrow and the Arrow's delicate balance of water inflow matching evaporation rate that had lasted for centuries was severely disrupted with the evaporation rate remaining the same but with the rate of water inflow severely reduced the Aral Sea began to quickly die and this wasn't helped by the fact that the Soviet irrigation canals were very shodily constructed and abhorrently inefficient the karakun canal that was finished in 1988 for example was carrying up to three cubic miles of water a year from the almudaria across 850 miles of the hot and dry karakum desert in Turkmenistan but anywhere between 30 and 75 percent of that water the canal carries is simply wasted to omnipresent leaks and simple evaporation as recently as 2012 it was estimated that only 2 12 percent of the canal length in Uzbekistan was actually even waterproofed and so in order to make up for all these inefficiencies the uzbeks and turkmen have simply withdrawn Evermore water from the river to force more water through the canals and through the leaks you see under normal circumstances the AMU and Sir Daria Rivers would collectively discharge close to 14 cubic miles of water a year into the Aral Sea from snowmelt and Glaciers high up in the tianshan and pamir mountains to the southeast but because of the Soviet transformation of Nature and all the irrigation canals the water flowing through these Rivers reaching the Aral Sea quickly dropped by more than 50 percent to just seven cubic miles and then because of Egypt's decision to quit exporting cotton to the Soviets back in the 70s and the subsequent Soviet expansion of all the irrigation canals in Central Asia the water volume reaching the arrow sea through these Rivers eventually plummeted to less than one cubic mile by the end of the 1980s less than seven percent of the water Earth that have been naturally reaching it before the transformation of nature the Soviets were effectively sucking these Rivers dry to irrigate their massive cotton project and in less than 40 years from beginning by 1998 the Aral Sea had already lost 80 percent of its water volume while its surface area had shrunk by around 60 percent and by that point the death of wood little remained of the sea was almost certain you see as the sea continued to lose more and more of water it continued to get shallower thus the incoming sunlight heated up smaller volumes of water and thus the water's surface temperature continued to increase faster and faster which increased the rate of evaporation ever further as the arrow sea continued to lose water it created this vicious positive feedback loop where the more water it lost the more rapidly it would continue to lose even more by 2014 95 percent of the water volume in the Aral Sea prior to 1960 had simply evaporated away to nothing and today little trace of the former sea remains at all as you can see in satellite photos like this one that was just taken in 2021 but what does continue to remain to the South is is all of the irrigated Lands still growing cotton in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan Uzbekistan continues to remain one of the top 10 largest producers and exporters of cotton in the world and controls a significant amount of the worldwide cotton Market representing around five percent of global cotton production and around 10 percent of worldwide cotton exports cotton is therefore uzbekistan's most significant business accounting for nearly a fifth of uzbekistan's exports the industry is state-owned and dominated by the Uzbek government while the cotton industry in turmenistan is smaller but still significant as the world's 11th largest cotton exporter and producer but the price that Central Asia has paid to enable this large cotton industry to exist namely the destruction of the Aral Sea is truly unbelievable in scale and destruction and unprecedented in human history back in its Heyday the Errol sea was one of the primary fishing centers of the Soviet economy 40 000 people were employed in the area's fishing industry and the arrow produced about a sixth of all the fish caught across the entire Soviet Union but by the 9 1980s as the sea shrank and what remained of the water rapidly became saltier the fish all began to die and disappear already by 1987 commercial fish harvesting on the Aral Sea had become Impossible by the 1990s the salinity levels in what little remained of the sea had made it impossible for any fish to survive at all and that wasn't even the fisherman's only problem as the sea continued to shrink fishing towns Villages and ports they used to be directly on the coastline for centuries suddenly found themselves dozens to hundreds of kilometers away from the actual water the town of Errol was once home to more than 50 000 people and was the primary center of the Region's fishing industry but by 2005 it found itself more than a hundred kilometers away from what little remained of the sea and even after the construction of a dam that brought some of the water back it's still to this day finds itself about 15 kilometers away from the water consequently the town is withered away over the decades as tens of thousands of former residents have been forced to to move on to Opportunities elsewhere across the former lake bed you will find countless fishing boats scattered across the Wasteland most of which have been rotting away in the sun now for decades after having me left abandoned by their crew the entire fishing industry and economy around the arrow sea crashed and died in exchange for the cotton industry in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan to thrive but that was far from the only severe consequence while it still existed the Aral Sea served to greatly moderate the climate around it in Central Asia cold and fast winds blowing down from Siberia in the winter would hit the sea and soften leading to warmer than usual temperatures during the winter well during the summer the sea would soak up radiation and heat and cool the temperatures down more than usual thus the area around the Aral Sea was a lot more climatically tolerable than elsewhere across the Central Asian deserts that would be freezing during the winter and scorching during the summer but obviously the arrow sees destruction also removed these moderating climate effects and as a result winds now blow in from Siberia uninterrupted during the winter and there is nothing to soak up any of the heat during the summer consequently the removal of the Aral Sea has resulted all on its own in an average temperature increase between two and four degrees Celsius during the summer months around the area where it once existed and that's not even factoring in any additional warming coming from global climate change further as the lake dried it left behind a brand new desert in its place the so-called aralcomm desert and it's basically just a complete post-apocalyptic Wasteland you see as the lake dried up and evaporated away the water remaining continued getting saltier and saltier to the point where by 1998 its salt concentration was 376 grams per liter which is more than 10 times saltier than ocean water is and more comparable to levels seen in the infamously salty dead sea between Israel Palestine and Jordan then as the lake dried up further more and more of this salt was left behind on the floor of the growing aralcomm desert that was replacing it and without the sea to moderate the strong winds blowing in from Siberia to the Northeast the winds began kicking up the dust and the salt to generate large-scale salty dust storms throughout the year and these dust storms can get huge they're frequently able to be viewed by satellites from space and they often reach widths of 150 to 300 kilometers across or about the size of New Jersey and everywhere they go they carry a lot of salt during the summer months as much as 30 to 40 percent of these dust storms volume is just straight up pure salt and a lot of those Northern and northeasterly winds blowing down from Siberia blow all of that salt and dust across the irrigated cotton fields of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan which as you can imagine is not very good for growing crops now to compensate for this the uzbeks and turkmen have simply withdrawn Evermore water from the almudaria to flush their fields repeatedly and remove the salt which ultimately means that crops growing on their farms and plantations require about four times as much fresh water to sustain reasonable growth levels as they need under normal growing conditions but of course the problem with constantly having to flush the soil with water in order to remove all that salt is not only that it withdraws ever more water from the rivers that feed the arrows sea but that it also washes away the minerals and the nutrients in the soil that the crops actually need a crow and so then to compensate for that the uzbeks and turkmen have been using an absolutely insane amount of pesticides and fertilizer on their desert Cotton Fields as much as four times the amount that International Health standards believe are acceptable and healthy so over the decades a lot of these overused pesticides and fertilizers were simply dumped back into the rivers as runoff and sent into the arrow sea and so is the sea shrink these toxins were left behind on the surface of the new and growing aralcomm desert as well so now not only are the dust storms blowing around a lot of salt but they're also blowing around a lot of toxins to boots it probably doesn't also help that bacteria in the Soviet era there used to be an island within the Aral Sea known as volia its location in the middle of the LLC surrounded by water in the middle of Central Asia meant that it was very remote and so the Soviets constructed a top secret biological weapons research lab there that lab is known to have tested numerous biological agents like Anthrax Bubonic plague and smallpox among many others and their safety standards left a lot to be desired in 1971 an amount of weaponized smallpox was somehow released from the lab and infected and killed a few of the residents in the Lakeside town of Errol hundreds of people were forcefully quarantined while tens of thousands more were vaccinated after the Soviet Union collapsed the lab was hastily abandoned by the largely Russian scientists who worked there in 1992 and then by 2001 as the arrow sea levels continued to shrink the island of volia became a peninsula connected to the mainland several of the containers within the lab storing weaponized biological agents were never properly stored or destroyed in the Hasty evacuation following the Soviet Union's collapse and many of them are known to have developed leaks most famously in 2002 the United States intervened to help Uzbekistan with decontaminating 10 burial sites of Anthrax on the former Island today the former island is completely connected to the rest of the new aralcomm desert and it's unclear exactly how much of the biological agents there have gotten into the Region's already toxic and salty dust storms regardless the new dust storms blowing up from the new desert are known to have caused numerous negative health effects across the Aral Sea region toxic chemicals associated with the overuse of pesticides have been discovered in the blood and breast milk of mothers in the area the rate of infants in the area who were born under weight or with abnormalities are five times higher than in Europe the mortality rate for children younger than five around the former Aral Sea is now the highest anywhere in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa and there have been significant increases in the rates of cancers and lung diseases and these toxic dusts blow all around the world erokun desert dust has been discovered as far away as Norway and Greenland while toxic pesticides in the dust have even been discovered contaminating the blood of penguins in Antarctica but the worst I side effect of the arrows these destruction is something that really hasn't even happened yet but is almost bound to happen in the future it will eventually push Central Asia into one of the greatest conflicts of the 21st century you see with the end of the volume of water in the Aral Sea there's no longer any significant water evaporation taking place around it and consequently the winds blowing in from Siberia that reached the tianchon mountains and pamir mountains down in the South and the southeast are carrying a lot less moisture than they used to and that means that there's less precipitation and snowfall taking place in these mountains than normally feed the glaciers that feed the almudarya and suradaria rivers in the first place and then to exacerbate that problem the dust storms now blowing into the mountains are carrying a lot of salt and dust that are coating the glaciers and accelerating their melting process even further because of these local factors an additional worldwide climate change the glaciers in these mountains are Now Melting at a rate that is 12 times faster than they were were before the 1960s when the Soviets began the transformation of nature project and with less snowfall there's less ability to replace what is being lost this is why you pretty often now get spectacular and viral footage like this clip that was captured by a British hiker in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan just a few months ago back in July of this year depicting one of these glaciers collapse now of course these Glaciers are the primary sources of water that feed the amudaria and Sir Daria rivers that used to feed the Aral Sea not to even mention nearly all of their people's fresh water supplies when the glaciers here inevitably melt away to lumps the little water remaining flowing into the rivers will present the nations of Central Asia with potentially their greatest challenge in history Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan higher up in the mountains depend on the water flowing down their steep slopes to generate nearly their entire supplies of electricity hydroelectric dams constructed along the ciradaria provide more than 90 percent of kyrgyzstan's electricity while hydroelectric dams constructed along the almudaria provide 98 of tajikistan's electricity both of these countries depend on the water flowing through these Rivers for their energy Independence and security but as the water flow inevitably grows less and less with time they will be incentivized to construct more dams on their rivers to capture more of the river's shrinking energy potential but building more dams and keeping more of the shrinking water supply for themselves will inevitably become an existential threat to the country's further Downstream the rivers like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan man that also depend on the river's Waters to irrigate their cotton Industries because without their cotton it's likely that both of their governments would go bankrupt and that's still not to even mention that ever since the transformation of nature began here in the 1960s the Region's demographics have radically changed 60 years ago back in 1960 Central Asia Only Had a combined population of about 24 million people but today there are three times as many people around at about 75 million and the country that has contributed the most towards that overall growth is Uzbekistan their population has grown by four-fold over the past 60 years and there are now roughly as many uzbeks in Central Asia as all the other ethnic groups there combined the kazakhs the kiraj the tajiks and the turkmen consequently the human demand for water in Central Asia is multiple times higher today than it was before the death of the Aral Sea and it is the uzbeks who have the strongest single demand the political borders of all the countries in Centralia Asia were largely drawn up by Joseph Stalin nearly a century ago in order to ensure maximum conflict between them were they ever to become independent in the future as they did in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed all of the Region's ethnicities are mixed up across each other's borders most infamously evidenced by the Soaps District found here two chunks of Uzbekistan that are completely surrounded by Kyrgyzstan and entirely populated by ethnic to Geeks as a consequence of these kinds of soviet-era policies and tactics there are millions of uzbeks who live just outside of the borders of Uzbekistan the state across regions of Turkmenistan Kyrgyzstan Tajikistan Afghanistan and Kazakhstan as the supply of Central Asia's water in its two primary Rivers dries up there will simply not be enough water to supply everybody's needs and meet everybody's security and Uzbekistan will be the most geopolitically well placed to outmaneuver and dominate the others in order to ensure that they he will be the ones to control whatever remains of the water the fragano valley here is the population core of Central Asia it is where the sear Daria River begins effectively making the valley a lush Oasis in the middle of the otherwise empty desert a quarter of Central Asia's population lives within this Valley and it is also precisely where the political borders of Uzbekistan Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan all converge to clash the neck of Tajikistan that stretches up into the valley in the north is primarily inhabited by ethnic uzbeks and yet it largely serves to divide Uzbekistan the state into two distinct halves separating their control in the Valley from the rest of the country under a pretext of ethnic Liberation like the Russians have been experimenting with in Ukraine it's no longer inconceivable that Uzbekistan could one day use this as their Casas ballet as well to attack and invade Tajikistan at some point in the future in order to not only secure more of the Fertile fergana Valley but if they go for an all-out conquest of Tajikistan they they can secure the headwaters of the almudaria as well in order to ensure their continued access to whatever remains of the river's depleted water supplies and at the same time Turkmenistan continues to divert enormous volumes of water away from the almudaria river through their inefficient CARICOM Canal to irrigate their own Cotton Fields however nearly 600 000 uzbeks live within Turkmenistan just across the border from present day Uzbekistan and they all happen to be located almost directly adjacent to the start of the karakum canal that diverts all of that water away from the almudaria and away from Uzbekistan if Uzbekistan utilizes the pretext of ethnonationalist unification to go to war with Tajikistan in order to secure the headwaters of the omudaria river then it's also conceivable that they would use the exact same pretext to also go to war with Turkmenistan in order to secure and destroy the karakum canal thus ensuring their own complete control over the entire River remaining water supply under that scenario Turkmenistan will almost certainly collapse as a state because the CARICOM Canal is where Turkmenistan still acquires the vast majority of their own fresh water supplies for their own people and cotton industry but on paper Uzbekistan has got the numbers and the demographic odds on its side to win this future conflict and with Russia facing demographic and Military catastrophe of their own in Ukraine it is now unlikely that Moscow would be capable of fending off uzbekistan's attacks on its supposed allies Tajikistan in Kyrgyzstan are theoretically members of the csto military Alliance essentially Russia's version of NATO meaning that they could each appeal to Russia for military assistance wuru Uzbekistan ever to go on the offensive but in September of 2022 Azerbaijan attacked Armenia another csto member State who appealed to the alliance for support and Russia refused because they're too busy getting wrecked in Ukraine Russia is a distracted and dying Empire and they would likely possess little ability or will to interfere with the worsening geopolitical situation to their South in Central Asia that potentially leaves China to intervene but who knows how willing they would even be to do so with their own internal concerns in xinjiang and Tibet zero kovid and foreign policy objectives more closely focused on Taiwan regardless of how the events play out Central Asia is effectively a powder cake waiting to blow and if I were you I would be paying a lot closer attention to what's going on there and specifically what is happening in Uzbekistan it may very well become the country that makes the most headlines later on this decade ultimately in the end the Soviet great transformation of nature certainly worked in the sense that it did indeed greatly transform the nature and the environment of Central Asia forever it just wasn't in the way that they had hoped their quest to ban nature to the will of man here is perhaps one of the greatest lessons to to face Humanity over its entire existence when we attempt to play God and change the way the earth works it's just like playing with a monkey's paw and asking it for a wish your wish may be granted but not at all in the way that you expect it to be the environmental curse that the Aral sees absence has established across Central Asia will be with us all for a very long time and the worst of its consequences have still yet to even manifest themselves for whenever man attempts to fight against nature nature will always win eventually because Nature has billions of years longer than we've got all of us only have a limited amount of time in a given day and it's hard to dedicate a lot of that precious time to something we all love doing eating taking yourself to a grocery store and painstakingly searching for everything you need or want and then driving back home just takes up a lot of time but hellofresh greatly innovates on this inefficient model by shipping precisely what you want in the exact quantity you need directly to your front door you just use their app or website to select one of 30 different meal options each week and then all of their ingredients show up directly on your doorstep in an insulated ice packed box they're so good at this that they'll even adjust the amount 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or by following the link down in the description below and use code real life lore70 to get 70 off plus free shipping and as always thank you so much for watching

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Length: 26min 29sec (1589 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 08 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/StatementBot]

The following submission statement was provided by /u/fuzzyshorts:

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The Aral Sea was once the 4th largest lake in the world, lying between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Russia wanted to use this body of water to make itself a cotton industry to rival India and the west. Unfortunately, the plans drained the lake, causing it to become a desert which now causes multiple havocs on the region and the world at large.

its this level of mismanagement, the hubris of nations that believe they can continually alter the ecosystem without there being dire repercussions. We have forgotten to walk gently. Our belief in our supremacy over the natural world only reveals the mediocrity, the shallowness of our understanding. And nothing this shallow, nothing this mediocre can ever sustain.

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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/z7grtl/why_russia_destroyed_the_worlds_4th_biggest_lake/iy6hjme/

[u/fuzzyshorts]

The Aral Sea was once the 4th largest lake in the world, lying between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Russia wanted to use this body of water to make itself a cotton industry to rival India and the west. Unfortunately, the plans drained the lake, causing it to become a desert which now causes multiple havocs on the region and the world at large.

its this level of mismanagement, the hubris of nations that believe they can continually alter the ecosystem without there being dire repercussions. We have forgotten to walk gently. Our belief in our supremacy over the natural world only reveals the mediocrity, the shallowness of our understanding. And nothing this shallow, nothing this mediocre can ever sustain.

[u/FourierTransformedMe]

At the end of the day, what we get from this is that Soviet-style communism (state capitalism imo but I'm not here to argue that point) shared a key flaw with capitalism: a fetishization of exploiting "natural resources" for material gain. How those resources get distributed has a real impact on our relationship with the environment, but no system based on that premise will ultimately suffice to avert what's coming. The Aral Sea should serve as a reminder that neoliberalism, or even capitalism generally, is not uniquely capable of environmental destruction. The constant growth logic of capitalism is the most significant culprit in the modern day, which is why I oppose it, but the alternative has to be better - we ignore that lesson at our own peril.

As a geographic note, it's the USSR, not Russia. Whatever one might want to say about the economics of the situation, the cotton program was initiated by Khrushchev, who was a Soviet leader. The continued loss of the Aral Sea in the post-Soviet era has more to do with the government of Uzbekistan than it does with Russia.

[u/WormOnAString7]

note that most of it happened after the collapse of the ussr

[u/MuelDaddyLongLegs]

Is there any chance of reversing this ecological disaster?

[u/psychotronic_mess]

The biological research lab was a gratuitous amount of icing on this collapse cake.

[u/BTRCguy]

Why Russia Destroyed the World's 4th Biggest Lake

Um, because they're as considerate of their environment and resources as they are of their people?