Sad return to a disappearing sea

Never Go Back – it’s the title of a Lee Child thriller and advice I should probably have taken when I made a visit to what remains of the Aral Sea now shared by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

It is almost 50 years since I was last there and then, while never really a sea, Aral was still the fourth largest lake in the world. My memories are of great clouds of seabirds, almost blotting out the sun, the smell of fish being landed on the quays of the busy little port of Moynaq, the dark blue waters stretching to the horizon.

In the half century since the Aral has suffered what United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has described as one of the worst environmental disasters in the planet’s history. It began when water from the two major rivers that flowed into the sea was diverted by the former Soviet Union for agricultural projects.

With a callous disregard for the environment and for those that earned their living from the Aral, Soviet scientists described the sea as a “natural mistake” which would eventually dry up through evaporation anyway, apparently ignoring the geological evidence that it had been around for at least five million years.

As a result Moynaq now sits on the edge of a dry, dusty desert, rusting remains of fishing boats and decrepit piers the only evidence that water once flowed there.

Ask the locals where the water is now and estimates vary from 60 kilometres to 150 kilometres somewhere out on the salt flats. No one really knows and no one wants to find out as a trudge across this barren moonscape, especially in the heat of summer, would be dangerous, if not deadly.

The wind whips a light dusting of salt into the air; when it blows harder the dust ends up on what agricultural land survives, poisoning it. The infant mortality rate is the highest in Uzbekistan and diseases such as cancer, tuberculosis and hepatitis are rife.

The Soviets are gone, but their legacy remains. The Aral Sea is now about 10 per cent of its original size and has split into a series of tiny stretches of water, some of them hardly more than large ponds.

In the north the Kazakhs, with help from the World Bank, are attempting some remediation with limited success, but Uzbekistan has simply continued Soviet irrigation practices to feed its cotton crops.  

There is an organisation called the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea, but its efforts are concentrated in the north where there is some motivation for the work. In the south all is despair and hopelessness.

Perhaps it would have been better not to have returned.