Desirable and Inevitable

The photographs are familiar even to people who could not find Uzbekistan on a map: fishing boats, rusted the colour of old blood, sitting upright on sand with no water anywhere in sight. They are at Moynaq, which used to be a port on the Aral Sea. What the photographs don't show is that for years after the water left, the town's fish cannery kept running. When a National Geographic writer visited at the end of the 1980s, the plant employed 900 people, and the fish being processed that day had come by train from Murmansk, on the Barents Sea, 1,750 miles away.

The sea had been given up on purpose. The town was being kept alive on paper.

What the sea was

In 1960 the Aral was the fourth largest inland body of water on earth, behind only the Caspian, Lake Superior and Lake Victoria. It covered about 68,000 square kilometres.

It was a terminal lake, meaning water flowed in and none flowed out. Two rivers fed it, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, and evaporation under the desert sun took the water away again. For the first six decades of the twentieth century the two balanced so neatly that the level moved by less than a metre. The water was brackish, about 10 grams of salt to the litre, under a third as salty as the ocean, and full of freshwater fish.

In 1957 the commercial catch was 48,000 tonnes. Moynaq alone had 10,000 fishermen and produced 3 per cent of the Soviet Union's entire annual catch.

The decision

By 1960 about five million hectares of the basin were already irrigated, without any measurable loss to the sea. What changed in the 1960s was scale, and the crop was cotton. New canals carried the rivers out into the desert. Every drop sent down the largest, the 1,300 kilometre Karakum Canal, was lost to the Aral for good. By 1980 irrigation covered nearly 6.5 million hectares of the basin, and by 1987 an estimated 7.6 million.

Nobody involved was surprised when the sea shrank. Philip Micklin, the American geographer who has spent most of his career on the Aral, set it out in Science in 1988. The planners predicted it, and "a number of experts saw this as a worthwhile tradeoff: a cubic meter of river water used for irrigation would bring far more value than the same cubic meter delivered to the Aral Sea." Its "ultimate shrinkage" to "a residual brine lake," he wrote, "was viewed as both desirable and inevitable."

The same experts expected the damage to stay local, with the toxic salts on the dried bed sealed under a durable crust. Some suggested the old seabed could be farmed. A small number of scientists warned of serious harm, and were not heeded.

What happened

By 1987 the level had dropped nearly 13 metres and the area had fallen by 40 per cent. By September 2011 the sea had broken into four parts and lost 85 per cent of its area and 92 per cent of its volume. In the deepest southern part the level had fallen nearly 26 metres, and the water held more than 100 grams of salt per litre, ten times what it had in 1960.

The fish went first. By the early 1980s, 20 of the 24 native species had disappeared and the commercial catch was zero. Boats could no longer reach Moynaq in the south or Aralsk in the north, and the canneries in both towns hung on by processing fish brought in from the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Arctic.

The crust never formed. Soviet scientists began picking up major dust storms on satellite images in 1975, and by the late 1980s an estimated 43 million tonnes of salt a year were being lifted off the dried bed and dropped over 150,000 to 200,000 square kilometres of surrounding land. The bed also held what the cotton fields had sent down the rivers: fertilisers, pesticides and defoliants.

The people on the shore

Karakalpakstan, the autonomous republic on the southern shore that contains Moynaq, has the worst health in the basin. Its infant mortality rate rose from 45 per thousand live births in 1965 to 72 in 1986. A survey in Moynaq in the early 1990s found 70.4 per cent of children under five had nutritional anaemia. Studies at Aralsk found dioxin in breast milk at ten times the levels of comparison countries.

The researchers are careful about cause. Micklin and his co-authors say the most serious problems come from contaminated drinking water, poor sanitation and poor medical care, and that pollution from the pesticides and defoliants used on cotton is a separate injury from the drying. A review of children's health studies in the region found that, for all the suspicion of the dust, the main respiratory studies had found no significant link between dust deposition and lung function. The same review concluded that the literature "unequivocally illustrates the seriousness of the public health tragedy."

The one corner

By the late 1980s the sea had split in two. The northern Small Aral, in Kazakhstan, is fed by the Syr Darya, and its water was draining south through the Berg Strait into the larger, saltier basin, where it evaporated.

Local people dammed the channel with sand in 1992. It worked, partly, and it kept breaking. In April 1999 the water burst through, killing two workers and washing away 27 others, who had to be rescued by boat and helicopter.

The permanent version was a 13 kilometre dike across the same gap, called Kok-Aral, built under a World Bank project that cost about 86 million dollars, most of it covered by a 64.5 million dollar loan to Kazakhstan. It was finished in 2005. The Small Aral had been expected to take about ten years to fill. It took two.

The Bank's completion report records the rest. The level rose from 38 metres to the design level of 42. The surface grew from 2,400 square kilometres to 3,300. Salinity more than halved, to under 10 grams per litre. The water's edge, 75 kilometres from Aralsk harbour in 2001, was 35 kilometres away by August 2010. The region's recorded fish catch went from 52 tonnes in 2004 to 2,650 tonnes in 2009. By 2016 it was about 6,000 tonnes, with carp, bream, pike-perch and pike back in the water.

In May 2025 Kazakhstan and the World Bank announced a second phase, rebuilding the dam to raise the level to 44 metres and the area to about 3,913 square kilometres.

The rest of the sea

The dike is a decision too. It holds the Syr Darya's water in the north, and only what overflows its spillways goes south. The southern Aral, mostly on the Uzbek side, gets whatever the Amu Darya still carries after the irrigation districts upstream have taken their share.

In the summer of 2014 NASA's images showed that the eastern basin of the southern sea had dried out completely. "This is the first time the eastern basin has completely dried in modern times," Micklin told NASA, adding that it was "likely the first time it has completely dried in 600 years."

In 1990 the faded sign on the terminal at Moynaq airport still read: "The City of Fishermen Welcomes You."

Sources

• Philip P. Micklin, "Desiccation of the Aral Sea: A Water Management Disaster in the Soviet Union", Science, 1988 (the 1960 area and salinity; the losses by 1987; irrigated area in 1960, 1980 and 1987; the Karakum Canal; the planners' prediction and the quoted tradeoff and "desirable and inevitable" passages; the crust theory; the lost species, the 1957 catch; the canneries on ocean fish; the dust storms and 43 million tonnes of salt a year).
• Philip Micklin, "Introduction", in The Aral Sea: The Devastation and Partial Rehabilitation of a Great Lake, Springer, 2014 (the ranking behind the Caspian, Superior and Victoria; the stable level before 1960; the losses by September 2011; the causes of ill health; infant mortality in Karakalpakstan).
• National Geographic, "A Soviet sea, killed by an obsession with 'white gold'", William S. Ellis, first published February 1990 (Moynaq's fishermen and share of the Soviet catch; the plant of 900 workers on fish from Murmansk; the airport sign).
• Eric J. Crighton and others, "What have we learned? A review of the literature on children's health and the environment in the Aral Sea area", International Journal of Public Health, 2010 (anaemia in Moynaq; dioxin in breast milk at Aralsk; dust and lung function; the quoted conclusion).
• World Bank, "Implementation Completion and Results Report: Syr Darya Control and Northern Aral Sea Phase-1 Project", 2011 (the loan and project cost; filling in two years against an expected ten; the level, area, salinity, distance from Aralsk and fish catch figures).
• Kristopher D. White and Philip Micklin, "Ecological restoration and economic recovery in Kazakhstan's Northern Aral Sea region", Focus on Geography, 2021 (the 1992 sand dike and the 1999 breach; the 13 kilometre dike and its spillways; the 2016 catch and returning species).
• NASA Earth Observatory, "The Aral Sea Loses Its Eastern Lobe", 2014 (the eastern basin dry in August 2014, and Micklin's quoted comments).
• The Times of Central Asia, "Kazakhstan and World Bank Launch Second Phase to Revive Northern Aral Sea", 19 May 2025 (the second phase and its targets).