The Aral Sea: How the USSR Destroyed the World's Largest Lake

In August 2014, satellite images released by NASA revealed something terrifying.

For the first time in modern history, the entire eastern basin of the Aral Sea in central Asia had completely dried up. What was once a spectacular natural body of water, complete with a diverse marine life and over one thousand individual islands, had shrivelled up to just one-tenth of its formidable former size. And what lay in its place was now just an empty, barren wasteland — commonly referred to as the Aralkum desert.

In some ways, the images also revealed something even starker. They revealed the undeniable consequences of human interference with the earth’s natural features.

The Sea and Soviet Misadventures in Kazakhstan

The former sea straddles the frontier between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan: where for generations, it played a key role in the lives of the local populations. But all that changed in the 20th century with the introduction of ambitious agriculture schemes which were, well, uniquely Soviet.

Kazakhstan was the second-largest republic of the USSR after Russia, at a monumental 2.7 million square kilometres. Due to its relatively small population — contributed to, in part, by a series of Soviet-engineered famines — it was largely full of exactly nothing but open plains. Perfect, therefore, to host some of the most destructive misadventures in human history.

In fact, we’ve covered one of these in a separate video for this channel, about the nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk. Another example was the Scientific Research Test Range Number 5, usually referred to as the Baikonur Cosmodrome — a place which poisoned surrounding wildlife, caused acid rains, and killed hundreds of people in an accidental explosion in 1960. Yet what became of the Aral Sea was somehow even more dramatic, at least in its toll on the general landscape.

You see, aside from nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches, Kazakhstan became the site of a crop-growing experiment intended to help feed the vast Soviet population. The only problem was that any crop yield requires abundant provision of water, something not easy to come by in the dry, arid expanses of the Central Asian Steppe.

But as luck would have it, southern Kazakhstan happened to be home to one of the biggest bodies of water on the planet. The Aral Sea was the world’s fourth-largest lake, at around 68,000 square kilometers in water volume. It was fed by two major rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, which flowed into the region from further south. So, problem solved.

Unfortunately, once Soviet plans went into effect, all of what had made the sea so great started to quickly go away.

Stalin’s Great Plan and the Sea’s Decline

Under Joseph Stalin, plans were drawn up for what became known as the Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature.

The plan stemmed from the fact that the USSR’s agricultural prospects had been massively disrupted by the conflicts of the early part of its history. Starting with the Russian Civil War, massive infrastructural damage had left the western USSR economically depleted, and a surge in agricultural activity was needed. The central Asian steppe had the space within which this could be accomplished, but there was a problem. The weather.

The steppe experiences strong winds which make crop cultivation difficult. This type of wind is known as Sukhovey, and has a desertifying effect: causing water to rapidly dry up. High temperatures in the summer exacerbate this problem, by robbing soil of moisture even further and making irrigation of major agricultural projects practically impossible. The combined phenomenon is particularly acute in south Kazakhstan, where the Aral Sea is located.

So to account for this, a reconfiguration of the available water sourcing in the region was necessary.

So beginning in the 1940s, the rivers feeding the Aral Sea were diverted to be used to grow wheat crops. Similar initiatives were carried out in the European portion of the USSR, which collectively allowed the Plan for the Transformation of Nature to enter effect. This was not before causing yet another famine, which severely struck the Moldavian, Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs as well as Russia itself, and resulted in the loss of at least a million lives. But it did allow the acute need for food crops to be met, and some of the wheatfields in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were transformed to yield cotton, something which gathered pace as the most acute need for food began to subside.

However, the effects of the redirection of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers were dramatic.

Over time, the volume of the Aral Sea began to decline sharply. From 1961 to 1970, the sea level fell an average of 20 centimetres per year. By the 1970s, this had accelerated to more than 50 centimetres, and by the 1980s it had shot all the way up to 90 centimetres per year.

As mentioned before, the Aral Sea is located in both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and in some ways, the consequences for Uzbekistan were relatively mitigated. Sure, the sea dried up, but a lucrative cotton industry emerged which helps to sustain the country’s economy to this day. Radio Free Europe estimated that some 2 million Uzbeks from a population of roughly 35 million are today involved in the cotton harvest — and probably because of this, Uzbekistan has never really treated the decline of the sea with much urgency or pursued extensive initiatives to revive it.

But the aforementioned economic benefit was not quite felt comparably by Kazakhstan. Its cotton production is a little over one-tenth of its neighbour’s. In effect, Kazakhstan saw its half of the sea vanish in exchange for very little.

Within decades, the Aral Sea had surged to just a fraction of its former self, becoming little more than a salty puddle. The landscape was transformed into a haunting site, dotted with ghostly shipwrecks on dry, cracked earth. The once-thriving fishing industry was kaput, and the dusty remnants of the seabed began to kick up toxic salts and pesticides. This, in turn, started to create health problems for locals and an environmental headache for the planet.

Was all this foreseeable? Yes. In fact the Soviet planners knew that it was bound to happen. For one thing, the drying up of the Aral Sea had been documented at least once before. An account by a geographer from the year 1417 had described such a phenomenon after the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers were redirected for other purposes by local rulers. Moreover, as the plan got under way, Soviet scientists had described the drying up of the Aral Sea as ‘inevitable’ in both 1964 and 1968.

By the time communism fell, the major port city of Aralsk was no longer a port city and instead found itself in a desert, located more than one hundred kilometres away from what remained of the sea. The city became a sort of geographical oddity, with a bemusing assortment of grounded vessels and the rusting shell of what was once a harbour, now punctuated by poverty and the fading mosaics and monuments glorifying the socialist era.

An ironic sight, perhaps, if it weren’t quite so tragic.

A Grim Impact

So by the 1990s, the Aral Sea had shrivelled up almost completely, being now little more than a forgettable lake. Two lakes, in fact — since the receding pattern caused the remaining bodies to be split into the North Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and the South Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. The separation occurred around 1987, and remains in place today.

But what was just as striking was the environmental impact.

The high levels of salinity in the remaining water resulted in the effective destruction of all prospects of fishing in what remained of the sea, as various species of fish withered and died.

Moreover, as mentioned before, the retreating waters left in place a toxic pile of sand known as the Aralkum desert. The sand was laced with residues of pesticides and chemicals from the decades of agricultural runoff, and dust storms from the exposed seabed spread pollutants over thousands of kilometers, accelerated by the powerful winds of the steppe. This — like in other parts of Kazakhstan — brought respiratory illnesses and other health problems upon the local populations. Those who already watched our Semipalatinsk video will recall that similar destructive health defects have been observed in areas of northeastern Kazakhstan located close to the Polygon.

Basically, the seventy-ish years of Soviet occupation left two sizable chunks of the country hazardous to the populations who’d resided in them for centuries. And the peeling back of the water volume coughed up another Soviet-built curiosity, located on what had previously been the island of Vozrozhdeniya in the centre of the Aral Sea. The island was home to a laboratory known as Aralsk-7, on which it turned out that the authorities had been testing bioweapons for later use in warfare.

The top-secret facility had been established in 1948 and vacated in 1992, and tested a variety of destructive agents, including anthrax, smallpox, and tularemia. It was revealed that an accident in July 1971 had led to the release of the variola virus, which resulted in the deaths of three people. The BBC reported that the facility also killed an untold number of fish, and was likely responsible for the sudden death of some 50,000 Saiga antelope in the 1980s.

When combined with the Polygon and Baikonur, Aralsk-7 marked the hattrick of former Soviet facilities in Kazakhstan capable of delivering a dose of death to local residents.

But the impact of the sea’s decline would affect the populations in other ways too. The collapse of the fishing industry centred on the sea led to widespread unemployment and the decline of the local economy. Southern Kazakhstan remains the poorest part of the country to this day. In fact, the region within which the Aral Sea is located — Kyzylorda — has a GDP per capita around one-third that of the capital Astana, and less than one-sixth that of the wealthiest region, the oil-rich province of Atyrau on the Caspian Sea.

As had been the case in northern Kazakhstan during the famines of the early 1920s and 1930s, entire communities collapsed as villages became landlocked far away from the receding shoreline, and the young departed to pursue greater economic opportunities elsewhere.

Regeneration (Kind Of)

Despite this morose reality, some good news did appear on the horizon.

In the 2000s, a partial revival of the sea occurred following the construction of the Kok-Aral Dam in 2005, funded by the World Bank. The 12-km long dyke cut the meagre flow of water from the North Aral Sea to the South, potentially sealing the fate of the latter but intending to protect what remained of the former. And it worked.

The project helped stabilize the North Aral Sea, raising water levels and helping to bring down the high levels of salinity in the water. This allowed for the return of some species of fish to the sea, which were reintroduced later on in the 2000s. Within ten years of the dyke’s construction, the annual catch jumped from around 1,360 tonnes to over 7,000 tonnes of freshwater fish. For the first time in generations, locals were able to make a living from fishing in the sea.

The shoreline also made a comeback, and crept back to within 20 kilometres of the city of Aralsk once more.

But it is not all good news.

While the Kok-Aral Dam proved a success, further development was needed to bulwark the regeneration of the sea. It was proposed to raise the dyke walls by four metres, which would allow an additional 15 billion cubic metres of water to accumulate in the North Aral Sea, and extend its area by a further fifty percent. Plans to do this were put forward as the second phase of the World Bank project, but have since stalled: reportedly awaiting approval from the Kazakh government to move forward. In the meantime, there are signs that the water level of the sea may be falling, and the salinity of the water is rising once more.

In short, despite the positive signs, the revival of the North Aral Sea is very far from assured. Due to the above-average rate of evaporation in the steppe, the sea is reliant on consistent water flow from the Syr Darya river. But that water flow is weak, and in perpetual danger of declining further.

The river has its source further south in Kyrgyzstan, and flows through Tajikistan and Uzbekistan before reaching Kazakhstan’s Kyzylorda region. With four countries reliant on it, should any one of those decide to repurpose its flow, the consequences for the sea would be swift and grave. And while there aren’t currently any plans for any of those countries to do so, there is little to say that they couldn’t.

Relations between the neighbouring states aren’t always great, and agreements on water sourcing have become highly politicised and a thorny topic at international conferences in the past. And although the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea (IFSAS) was established in 1993, composed of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, it is Kazakhstan which remains its most proactive member in endeavouring to resolve the water recession of the sea.

Meanwhile, the South Sea in Uzbekistan remains largely a wasteland, with no significant recovery efforts currently being pursued to revive it. There are fears it faces further peril still, as in late 2023, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev, expressed that a canal being built by the Taliban in Afghanistan would lead to a further decrease in the water volume flowing into the Amu Darya, by now the lifeblood of the South Aral Sea.

And both the Syr and Amu Darya rivers are under threat with climate change threatening to their water content further, something which would wreak untold havoc not only on the sea, but also on Central Asian farming more generally. Experts predict that water carried by the rivers could drop by around 15 percent in the coming decades.

Currently, the Aral Sea Basin has become a draw for environmentalists and curiosity travelers, visiting both for the dramatic lessons and the beauty found in the desolation.

It may not be quite the paradise it once was, but its story stands as a powerful lesson on the impact of human intervention on the planet.

Frequently Asked Questions

What caused the Aral Sea to dry up?

The Aral Sea dried up due to the diversion of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers for Soviet agricultural projects, particularly the Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature initiated by Joseph Stalin.

How did the Soviet agricultural schemes affect the Aral Sea?

The Soviet agricultural schemes diverted the rivers feeding the Aral Sea to grow wheat and cotton crops, leading to a sharp decline in the sea’s water volume.

What was the Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature?

The Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature was a Soviet initiative aimed at increasing agricultural production by redirecting water from the Aral Sea to irrigate crops in the arid regions of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

What environmental impacts resulted from the drying of the Aral Sea?

The drying of the Aral Sea led to the creation of the Aralkum desert, which spread toxic salts and pesticides through dust storms, causing health problems for local populations and environmental degradation.

What was the impact of the Aral Sea’s decline on the local economy?

The decline of the Aral Sea led to the collapse of the fishing industry, widespread unemployment, and economic decline in the region, particularly in southern Kazakhstan.

What is the current status of the Aral Sea?

The Aral Sea is now split into the North Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and the South Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. The North Aral Sea has seen partial revival due to the Kok-Aral Dam, but its future is uncertain due to water flow issues.

What role did the Kok-Aral Dam play in the revival of the Aral Sea?

The Kok-Aral Dam, constructed in 2005, helped stabilize the North Aral Sea by cutting off water flow to the South Aral Sea, raising water levels, and allowing for the return of some fish species.

What are the challenges facing the revival of the Aral Sea?

Challenges include the weak and declining water flow from the Syr Darya river, political tensions among the countries sharing the river, and the threat of climate change reducing water content in the rivers.

What was the Aralsk-7 facility and what was its impact?

Aralsk-7 was a Soviet bioweapons testing facility on the island of Vozrozhdeniya in the Aral Sea. It tested agents like anthrax and smallpox, causing environmental damage and health issues for local populations.

How did the drying of the Aral Sea affect the city of Aralsk?

The drying of the Aral Sea left Aralsk, once a major port city, stranded over 100 kilometers from the remaining water, leading to economic decline and poverty.

Sources

• Original Places video: The Aral Sea: How the USSR Destroyed the World’s Largest Lake
• https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-00728-7_5
• https://daily.jstor.org/the-agonizing-death-of-the-aral-sea/
• https://www.worldometers.info/geography/largest-countries-in-the-world/
• https://www.rferl.org/a/central-asia-cotton-diminishing-returns/32698749.html
• https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cotton-production-by-country
• https://sma.nasa.gov/docs/default-source/safety-messages/safetymessage-2005-11-01-nedelinrocketdisaster-vits.pdf
• https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170926-the-deadly-germ-warfare-island-abandoned-by-the-soviets
• https://stat.gov.kz/en/industries/economy/national-accounts/publications/81256/
• https://dark-tourism.com/index.php/500-aralsk-and-the-north-aral-sea-kazakhstan#s
• https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180719-how-kazakhstan-brought-the-aral-sea-back-to-life
• https://timesca.com/can-the-aral-sea-be-saved/
• https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/water-war-in-central-asia-the-water-dilemma-of-turkmenistan/
• Hero image source by Nurken / openverse, by-sa.