ARAL SEA: HISTORY, IRRIGATION, TOWNS, TOURISM

ARAL SEA

The Aral Sea in 1985 when it was the fourth largest lake in the world; at that time it covered an area of approximately 67,000 square kilometers (26 000 square miles), was approximately 420 kilometers (260 miles) long, 280 kilometers (175 miles) wide, and had an average depth of 10 meters (33 feet) and a maximum depth of 70 meters (of 220 feet); the photograph was taken by the STS-51-F mission

The Aral Sea, located between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in a large geological depression, , was the fourth largest lake in the world in the 1973. Covering 66,900 square kilometers (26,000 square miles) and measuring 400 kilometers from north to south and 280 kilometers for east to west, it was once as large as West Virginia and was larger than each of the Great Lakes save Superior, with more water than Lake Erie and Lake Huron combined. [Source: William Ellis, National Geographic, February 1990;

Millions of years ago the Aral Sea, Black Sea, and Caspian Sea were one part of a massive inland sea. Up until the 1970s, the Aral Sea was once full of clear water and was teaming with fish. There were good swimming beaches. Regular ferries crossed it from north to south. A variety of animals could be found in the forest along the shores and wetlands of Syr-Darya and Amu-Darya delta.

But things are much different now. The victim of a Soviet era water diversion project in Central Asia, the Aral Sea now holds a fraction of its original water volume. Between the 1960s and 1990s the Aral Sea has lost nearly two-thirds of its volume and half of its previous surface area; its level dropped nearly 15 meters (50 feet) and it split in two and its salinity increased nearly threefold. The disappearance of the water also altered the regional climate, producing hotter summers, colder winters, and increased dust and salt storms.

Jeremy Berlin of National Geographic wrote: “ Seen from a satellite, today’s Aral Sea is but a cluster of green globs. The brown, beige, and white? Some 3,240 square miles of dirt, dust, and salt—a toxic mess blown by sandstorms and tied to local health problems and climate changes. In 1960 this was an inland sea the size of Ireland. But heedless river diversion—for irrigation to wrest cotton and rice from the Central Asian desert—and evaporation have shriveled it by 90 percent. Since 2005 a World Bank–funded dam has revived the northernmost lake’s fish and fishing industry.”

Book: “The Devil and the Disappearing Sea” by Rob Ferguson

Early History of the Aral Sea

- 1848 - 1853 Survey of the Sea of Aral by Bytakoff

Mark Synnott wrote in National Geographic: “The Aral Sea straddles Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and for thousands of years was fed by two major rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. Having no outflow, the sea’s water level was maintained through a natural balance between inflow and evaporation. [Source: Mark Synnott, National Geographic, June 2015 +/]

“When Alexander the Great conquered this territory in the fourth century B.C., these rivers already had a long history of providing lifeblood to Central Asia. For centuries the Aral Sea and its vast deltas sustained an archipelago of settlements along the Silk Road that connected China to Europe. These ancient populations of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and other ethnicities prospered as farmers, fishermen, herders, merchants, and craftsmen. +/

Eve Conant wrote in Discover magazine: “For thousands of years, people have lived in the Aral Sea basin, which served as an oasis on the Silk Road, the trading route that linked China to Europe. "Three thousand years ago, this was an agricultural region," says Philip Micklin, an Aral Sea expert and geographer emeritus from Western Michigan University. "You'd have seen wooden irrigation canals all along the Amu Darya." Even in 1558, Anthony Jenkinson, an envoy for Queen Elizabeth I, foresaw trouble: "In short time all that land is like to be destroyed, and to become a wilderness for want of water." [Source: Eve Conant, Discover, September 2006 |=|]

Into the 1970s, the Aral Sea offered a constant supply of fish. Species that thrived in its waters included caviar-rich sturgeon, pike perch, and silver carp, known locally as fat tongue. The sea spread over more than 26,000 square miles, and ships could travel 250 miles from the northern port of Aralsk, in Kazakhstan, to the southern harbor of Muynak in Uzbekistan.

The Aral Sea has a history of shrinking. According to 1910 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica:”the great Blue Sea of Central Asia...occupies but a small portion of its former extent. It fills a shallow depression which is drying up with astonishing rapidity...large parts of it have dried up since the Russians took possession of it shores...Former rivers are channels. The main arteries of prosperous regions, have now disappeared.” It also described shells from the lake 200 feet above the sea’s level.

Aral Sea and Fishing

The Aral Sea was once full of clear water and was teaming with fish. There were 30 native species, including sturgeon and carp. It produced 160 tons of fish a day, or 45,700 tons a year, one sixth of total Soviet catch, and employed 60,000 people in the fishing industry. There was also a lucrative trapping industry, with the lust Syr and Amu deltas supplying a half million muskrat pelts a years.

fishing boats at the Aral Sea port of Muynak in 1952

By the early 2000s, the fish and muskrats were largely gone. The water was too salty now for fish and their spawning grounds had disappeared. Some indigenous species survived around the deltas. Black Sea flounder was introduced and survived in the main body of the northern Aral Sea. But by the early 2000s, the commercial fishing industry in the Aral Sea was dead. The boats that used catch fish are scattered around the remains of channels built on the desert of salt and sand. Fishing villages are ghost towns.

Ilan Greenberg wrote in the New York Times in 2006: “ In the Aral's heyday, 20 thousand tons of fish were harvested per year... With the disappearance of sea, fish and the ecologically interconnected freshwater lakes that supported livestock, the Aral region quickly lost population. Half of Karaterin's people had migrated to larger cities during the past two decades.” In the 1960s fish lived just outside the front door of fishermen’s homes. Most days, Zhaisanbayev, the son of a fishing boat captain, climbs into his truck parked at the edge of his grim village of scattered shacks and stray dogs and drives 32 kilometers through an infecund desert of gray sand and colorless prickly weeds to reach the water's edge. [Source: Ilan Greenberg The New York Times, April 7, 2006 ^]

Martin Fletcher wrote in The Times, “The Aral became heavily saline. Its 30 species of indigenous fish died. Its fishermen spurned the salt-water flounder, introduced in 1979, and moved away. The desiccated seabed was carpeted with a toxic sediment of salt laced with chemicals from the cotton fields, which duststorms then deposited over thousands of square miles. Drinking water was poisoned. [Source: Martin Fletcher, The Times, June 23, 2007 ]

Later History — the Beginning of the End — of the Aral Sea

The environmental decline of the Aral Sea began during the Soviet era, when the government sought to expand agricultural production across Central Asia. Beginning in the 1950s and accelerating in the 1960s, Soviet planners diverted large amounts of water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea. The water was redirected through an extensive network of irrigation canals to support the cultivation of cotton, rice, wheat, and other crops in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. [Sources: Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, August 9, 2018; Mark Synnott, National Geographic, June 2015; Eve Conant, Discover, September 2006 |=|]

The location of the Aral Sea and the watersheds of the Amu Darya (orange) and Syr Darya (yellow) which flow into it; the countries in the region are names and national capitals are in bold

The roots of this policy can be traced to the 1920s, when Soviet leaders sought to transform Central Asia into a major agricultural region. Under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union promoted large-scale cotton production, despite the region's dry climate and limited water resources. To support these goals, thousands of miles of irrigation canals were constructed, many of them dug by hand. The project became one of the largest irrigation systems in the world.

For several decades, the water system remained relatively stable. However, the continued expansion of irrigation networks in the 1960s dramatically increased water withdrawals from the rivers. Many canals were poorly constructed and highly inefficient, with some losing more than half of their water through leakage and evaporation before reaching agricultural fields. As a result, much less water reached the Aral Sea.

Scientists who studied the region have noted that Soviet planners were aware that diverting river water would reduce the size of the sea, but they underestimated the scale and speed of the environmental damage. The loss of river inflow caused the Aral Sea to shrink rapidly. By the 1970s, the effects were clearly visible as water levels fell, shorelines retreated, and the fishing industry began to collapse.

By 1987, the Aral Sea had divided into two separate bodies of water: the North Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and the larger South Aral Sea in Uzbekistan's Karakalpakstan region. As water levels continued to decline, the South Aral Sea split into eastern and western sections in 2002. In 2014, the eastern basin dried up completely for the first time in modern history.

The shrinking of the sea had major environmental and economic consequences. As the water disappeared, vast areas of exposed seabed were left behind. Winds carried dust, salt, and agricultural chemicals from the dry lakebed across the region. The loss of the sea also reduced local humidity and altered regional climate patterns. Communities that had depended on fishing and related industries faced economic hardship as fish populations disappeared and ports were left stranded far from the water.

Amu Dara basin shwoing some cropland irrigated by water that is supposed to flow into the Aral Sea

Some environmental historians and regional experts argue that Soviet water officials viewed the Aral Sea as less valuable than agricultural production. They often cited the views of Russian climatologist Aleksandr Voeikov, who described the sea as a "useless evaporator." Soviet planners generally believed that the economic benefits of expanding cotton and other crops outweighed the importance of maintaining the Aral Sea. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the newly independent Central Asian states largely maintained the existing water-allocation system, allowing many of the factors that contributed to the sea's decline to continue.

Aral Sea and Irrigation

The main culprit behind the drying up of the Aral Sea has been irrigation projects in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and to a lesser degree Kazakhstan used mainly used to nourish millions of acres of cotton fields (90 percent of the former Soviet Union's production). The water from these projects was supplied by Central Asia's two largest rivers—the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, which have traditionally flowed into the Aral Sea, supplying it with the vast majority of its water. Extremely low efficiency of irrigation systems in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan caused enormous overdrafts on these rivers.

As part of their massive cotton-growing, irrigation scheme, the Soviets built 32,000 kilometers of canals, 45 dams and more than 80 reservoirs to irrigate more than 4 million hectares of new crops. An area of desert and dry steppes was turned into one of the largest cotton-growing areas in the world. The waters of the Amu river began to flow into a canal, the world's longest, in 1956. At first there were no problems. Cotton production increasedd on around 50,000 square kilometers of newly irrigated land and the Aral Sea seemed unaffected.

In the 1960s the delicate equilibrium between the inflow of water and evaporation from the sea was thrown out of kilter. More land was brought under cultivation and the new irrigation was wasteful and inefficient. Water drained from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya doubled but cotton production only increased by 20 percent.

rice grown in southern Kazakhstan, possibly with water destined for the Aral Sea; local official were punished for it, Orda

Much of the water was lost due to waste. The canals were not lined or covered. Much of the water evaporated or drained into the soil before it reached the crops. What is even worse is that cotton-growing policy was launched about the same time synthetic fibers began hitting world markets. Cotton production never brought in as much money as it was supposed to most of it ended in Moscow not Central Asia.

In some places such as around the village Dzhalagash in Kazakhstan rice was grown in areas that receives only 15 centimeters of rain a year. More than 2.8 billion liters of water—enough to fill 13,000 Olympic-size swimming pools—was necessary to supply water for 100 hectares of rice paddies. The situation exist because the water was ludicrously cheap—only 65 center per swimming pool. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan each produced almost 65,000 hectares of rice.

The Kara-kum Canal is the world's longest irrigation canal. It stretches 1,350 kilometers (745 miles) from Haun-Khan to Ashkhabad and brings water from the Amu-Darya to the inhabited areas in southern Turkmenistan. Draining the Amu-Darya, it runs most of the length of Turkmenistan and is used to supply water for cotton farms. It has contributed to large cotton harvests and the shrinking of the Aral Sea. The canal leaks a lot of the water it carries and is badly in need of reconstruction. From the air its looks like a thin ribbon fringed by kilometers-wide bands of weeds. The Turkmenistan government admits that 28 percent of the water disappears before it reaches it destination. Scientist think the figure is close to 60 percent.

Consequences of Irrigation on the Aral Sea

While irrigation doubled cotton production it drained 55 million cubic kilometers of water a year, claiming three quarters of the flow of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. With so much water diverted the rivers were only trickles when they arrived at the Aral Sea. Unable to counteract evaporation the lake has simply been getting smaller and smaller.

Soviet authorities knew what was going on but doing nothing to stop pit. When they designed the irrigation scheme they expected the lake to dry up. In 1987, a Soviet planner said, "Let the Aral Sea die beautiful death."

Initially the irrigation boosted agricultural productivity. But later over-watering and leaks left some farmland to salty to support crops and the use and reuse of water made the water saltier and loaded it with pesticides and sewage. By some estimates irrigation of the Aral Sea has caused agricultural productivity in Central Asia to decline by one quarter. Yet demand for water exceed the flow of the two rivers that flow into the Aral Sea by more than 25 percent.

The inefficient use of water now means that as the Aral Sea shrinks so to does the land used by farmers. One farmer who talked to the New York Times said that his entire crop — grown on 32 hectares of state-owned farmland that he oversaw — was lost in 2000 because of a lack of water. In 2001 he grew only four hectares of cotton. In 2002 he raised six hectares of cotton and sunflowers.

Legacy of Aral Sea Irrigation — Land to Salty to Grow Crops

Reporting from Khujayli, Uzbekistan in 2008, Sabrina Tavernise wrote in the New York Times: Salt crunches underfoot like frosty soil on this bare stretch of land in western Uzbekistan. "Thirty years ago, this was a cotton field," said a 61-year-old farmer who has lived near this city all his life. "Now it's a salt flat." For decades Uzbekistan’s rivers were diverted to grow cotton on arid land, causing the Aral Sea to lose more than half of its surface area in 40 years. [Source: Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, June 15, 2008]

“But old habits are hard to break and, years after the Soviet Union collapsed, cotton is still king and the environmental destruction continues unabated, cutting into crop yields. Uzbekistan is the world's second-largest cotton exporter after the United States, drawing a third of its foreign currency earnings from the crop, but that status seems increasingly threatened by corruption, poor planning and the degradation of cropland.[Source: Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, June 15, 2008]

“Far less money is spent now on maintaining the vast networks of water drainage and irrigation that crisscross the country than was expended under communism. The authorities spend about $12 a hectare on maintenance, down from $120 a hectare in Soviet times, according to the International Water Management Institute. Blocked drainage pipes push salt levels up, damaging the land and dragging crop yields ever lower.

“A United Nations report in 2001 estimated that 46 percent of Uzbekistan's irrigated lands have been damaged by salinity, up from 38 percent in 1982 and 42 percent in 1995. "The delivery system is dilapidated, the drainage system is failing," said one foreign expert, who asked that his name not be used because he has to work with Uzbek officials. "It is a big problem." How that has affected cotton production is a difficult question. Cotton and its production are ensnared in politics, so national statistics on it are scarce. But a pattern of decline in the industry was evident in three regions based on local figures provided to The New York Times.

“In Karakalpakstan, the region that contains what is left of the Aral Sea, the total area of land under cultivation has dropped by 14 percent since 1991, according to local statistics. In the Bukhara region in the south, land planted with cotton has declined by 15 percent in the last eight years and in Jizzax, a region in central Uzbekistan, 15 percent of the cultivated land has become too salty to farm.

“In Manghit, a small city near Khujayli, an early sign of saltiness came in the 1980s when mushrooms that had grown along the banks of the mighty Amu Darya River began to disappear, a local farmer recalled. Soil that used to grow 4.5 tons of raw cotton, measured with seeds and stems, a hectare now produces 2.5 tons and in some places as little as 1.3 tons, said the farmer, who asked that his name not be used because Uzbek authorities frown on people speaking to foreign journalists. "When you see this salt, sad, dark thoughts take you," he said, explaining that the salt is what is left when water evaporates after intense irrigation. "Nothing grows on salty land. It's like standing on a graveyard."

Towns on the Aral Sea

People living in the towns around the Aral Sea—mainly the Karakalpak—have traditionally depended on it for water, fish and work. Muynak in Uzbekistan was once a large fishing center with 58,000 people. Once there were 10,000 fisherman working there, hauling in pike, perch and bream as "fat as piglets" from the Aral. The town produced 3 percent of the Soviet Union's annual catch. By 1980, the river at Munyuk dried up to a trickle. The last fishing boat set out in May 1983 and caught only one fish. Now the water is 50 miles away.

Muynak’s population had shrunk to about 25,000 in the 1990s. In attempt to keep Muynak's fish processing plant going fish were shipped in from 2,800 kilometers miles away from the Arctic Ocean. Now it’s a depressing, impoverished eyesore, many kilometers from the shore of the Aral Sea. Many of the people that used to live here have left. Many of those that remain have health problems. The main tourist sights are the beached ships that lie near the gas storage facility about three kilometers outside of town. Muynak has an Aral Sea museum.In glass jars you can see pickled versions of the fish that once lived in the sea as well as animals like fox, wolves and badgers that inhabited its wooded shores. For all intents and purposes reaching the Aral Sea is impossible. It can only be approached by foot. It is very difficult, even dangerous, to try to reach on your own. On the drive between Nukus and Muynak you can see fields damaged by salinization from irrigation.

Aralsk was once a pretty Kazakh fishing town accounted for 10 percent of the Soviet Union’s entire fish catch. People remember walking along the promenade and swimming in the sea after school. Now the shore is 60 miles away and the abandoned shipbuilding docks seem like bad jokes. It has the highest unemployment rates in Kazakhstan. A number of beached ships can be seen town of Dzhambu, 50 kilometers away. The lake near Aralask is getting larger due to the construction of a dam that diverts water to north lake. See Kazakhstan

Aral Sea Disaster Tourism

The environmental disaster of the Aral Sea has become a major tourist attraction. Visitors from around the world travel to the region to see the dramatic effects of one of the largest human-caused environmental changes in modern history. Many tourists are drawn by the contrast between the sea's former size and its present condition. [Source: Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, August 9, 2018]

The most famous attractions are the abandoned fishing vessels left stranded on the former seabed. Rusting ships that once sailed the Aral Sea now sit in the desert, providing striking visual evidence of the sea's disappearance. These vessels have become popular subjects for photography and social media.

Tourism has brought new economic opportunities to communities affected by the disaster. Local guides, guesthouses, transportation services, and small businesses now serve visitors interested in the region's environmental history. Some travelers also visit museums and educational exhibits that explain the causes and consequences of the sea's decline.

Environmental experts have noted that disaster tourism helps raise awareness of water management issues and environmental degradation. At the same time, many visitors view the experience as a reminder of the long-term consequences of unsustainable resource use. The Aral Sea has become an internationally recognized symbol of environmental mismanagement.

The Aral is divided into two isolated reservoirs — the Northern (Small) and the Southern (Large) Aral Sea. To get to the water, you need to cover about 200 kilometers along the bottom of the Aral Sea or the newly-formed Aralkum desert. At the water’s edge, clayey silt goes three meters deep. It is believed that this clay has healing properties. The seashore is covered with lots of shells. The sea is turquoise in color and seems like a mirage, surrounded by endless desert. The water in the Aral Sea is salty, as in the Dead Sea. It is necessary to swim in the sea with care so that the water does not get into the eyes.

Muynak

Muynak (180 kilometers north of Nukus) is a town with a several hundred people that once was a busy fishing center on the Aral Sea. In the 1990s it was a depressing, impoverished eyesore, 40 kilometers from the shore of the Aral Sea. Many of the people that used to live there had left. Many of those that remained had health problems. By 2018, teh Aral Sea was 120 kilometers (75 miles) away.

Muynak is the personification of the tragedy of the Aral Sea. It was once one of the Aral Sea's most important fishing ports. After received city status city in 1963, it grew to house 100,000 inhabitants. Before the sea began to disappear, the town supported a large fishing fleet and fish-processing industry. Thousands of residents depended on the sea for employment and economic activity. In the 1980s a memorial obelisk was installed in the center of Muynak, from which you could see the waters of the Aral Sea. Now all you can only see sands from here. [Source: Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, August 9, 2018]

Muynak was a rich port island in the Amu Darya river and a gateway into Uzbekistan. Ships from Kazakhstan o the northern Aral Sea came in with cargoes of fuel, fish and food, and left with bales of cotton. But those days are in the distant past now. It is interesting that even after the Aral tragedy in the region, nature seems to help people — a couple of kilometers from the city formed a freshwater lake, which solved the problem for the local population with drinking water.

The Aral Sea vanished from Muynak around 1986, As the shoreline retreated, Muynak lost direct access to the water. By the mid-1980s, the sea had largely disappeared from the town's waterfront, and the fishing industry collapsed. The former harbor was transformed into dry desert, leaving boats stranded far from the remaining shoreline. The only water on view is in the modest local museum, via careworn photographs and oil paintings that show what the Aral Sea was once like.

Muynak and Aral Sea Disaster Tourism

Today, Muynak is one of the main centers of Aral Sea disaster tourism. Visitors come to see the ship cemetery, museums, monuments, and other reminders of the town's maritime past. The main tourist sights are the beached ships that lie near the gas storage facility about three kilometers outside of town. The stranded vessels have become one of the most recognizable images associated with the Aral Sea disaster.

Tourism has become an important part of Muynak's economy. Hotels, guesthouses, cafes, and tour operators now serve growing numbers of domestic and international visitors. While tourism cannot replace the economic importance of the former fishing industry, it provides income and helps preserve awareness of one of the world's most significant environmental disasters.

Muynak in the past lacked a single hotel. As of 2018 there were three. In September of that year, a government-organized electronic music festival was held. Muynak has an Aral Sea museum. On clear days you can sometimes make out the shore. In glass jars at the museum you can see pickled versions of the fish that once lived in the sea as well as animals like foxes, wolves and badgers that inhabited its wooded shores. For all intents and purposes reaching the Aral Sea is impossible. It can only be approached by foot. It is very difficult, even dangerous, to try to reach on your own. On the drive between Nukus and Muynak you can see fields damaged by salinization from irrigation.

Ship Graveyard of Muynak is all that remains of the once mighty fishing fleet Muynak. Here for several kilometers you can see the remains of ships and barges. Over the years it has attracted filmmakers and photographers. It has also become popular among tourists that in 2017 a yurt camp was set for travelers. In 2019 an electronuc music festival was held here.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, Lonely Planet Guides, Library of Congress, U.S. government, Compton’s Encyclopedia, The Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, Foreign Policy, Wikipedia, BBC, CNN, and various books, websites and other publications.

Last updated July 2026