The Aral Sea Disaster

Overview of the Aral Sea Disaster Due to environmental disasters, the Aral Sea and the entire Aral Basin are welcomed all over the world. The Aral Sea disaster example sends a signal to the entire international community about how quickly and irreversibly the environmental system can be without a long-term thought or plan. This article outlines the policy that led to the death of the fourth largest inland waters.

In 2016, I visited Uzbekistan. There, he was working on a project in the Aral Sea, one of the greatest human-caused environmental disasters in history. When arriving in the desert where the Aral Sea's water was gone, the battery of the digital single lens reflex camera died while it was cold, so I had to relay it with my film camera. After a long distance to the ocean floor, I really want to make sure I have some good results. After I returned to Seoul, I made my movie, I was very pleased with my picture, and gladly chose one of the images to display.

The former wonderful Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan provides a powerful case study on the dangers of unsustainability. Decades ago, the Aral Sea was one of the world's largest salt water lakes. However, after the 1960s, more than 90% of the water supply volume has been lost. What's wrong? First of all, it is very important to provide some historical background. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are not independent countries, but are republics within the Soviet Union. In order to increase the production of cotton (requiring a lot of water), the Soviet Union has constructed an irrigation canal that sends water to the two main water sources of the Aral Sea, Syr Darya and Amu Darya. The Aral Sea began to shrink and formed the North Sea and the South China Sea (later divided into the West Sea and the East China Sea).

The devastating consumption of the two historic rivers, Syr Darya and Amu Darya, resulted in a rapid change in the Aral Sea, and greatly changed Amu Darya 's Delta. The majority of the rivers in the Delta are dry and once the Aral Sea in the fourth largest inland waters of the world, since 1961 it has lost two-thirds of its water volume and about two-fifths of its water volume . In several places, the sea coastline has retreated more than 75 miles (120 kilometers). In the north and the east, the huge shallow and dead pool was cut off from the main arar and the sand dams that occurred when the water level dropped about 45 ft between 1961 and 1992 were blocked. Amu Darya brought this dangerous decline. As the last two trickles in the desert, supporting the southern rivers of Amu Darya - Surkhan and Sherabad, followed by Zeravshan and Kashka - contributed very little traffic.