The Aral Sea: the twentieth century's greatest environmental disaster

In the port of Moynaq, on the southern edge of what was once the Aral Sea, there is a row of rusting fishing boats lined up on dry sand. Their hulls are eaten through by rust, their propellers motionless in the dust. The water that once floated them is now a hundred and fifty kilometres to the north. It took forty years to retreat that far, at a pace of three or four kilometres per year, so slowly that the people of Moynaq took time to understand what was happening.

That image — the boats stranded in the desert — is the most reproduced in all of Central Asia, and for good reason: there is no other way to compress into a single frame what happened here. The world’s fourth-largest lake disappeared in four decades, and the reason was a political decision made in Moscow in the 1950s.

The decision that destroyed a sea

In the 1950s, Soviet planners decided that cotton was the economic future of Central Asia. The problem was water: the plains of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are, for the most part, desert. The solution was to divert the two rivers feeding the Aral Sea — the Amu Darya in the south and the Syr Darya in the north — into an irrigation canal system that turned millions of hectares of desert into cotton fields.

The system worked. Uzbekistan became one of the world’s major cotton producers, and the USSR achieved self-sufficiency in the crop. The price was the Aral: without the inflow from its two feeder rivers, the lake began to shrink. In 1960 it covered 68,000 square kilometres and reached 68 metres in depth. By the 1980s it had lost half its surface area. By the 1990s it had essentially split in two: the North Sea (on the Kazakh side) and the South Sea (on the Uzbek side). By 2000, the South Sea had almost completely disappeared.

The lake bed and its consequences

What remained when the water receded was the Aralkum: the new Aral desert, formed from the dry lake bed. And that bed was not clean sand: it was a mixture of salt, pesticides, herbicides and heavy metals accumulated over decades of intensive industrial agriculture. The dust storms that lift this mixture — frequent in the region — travel hundreds of kilometres and deposit that toxic load onto the crops, water and lungs of the people living in the area.

The health consequences in Karakalpakstan — the autonomous Uzbek region that bordered the former lake — are among the most severe in the world: rates of oesophageal, bladder and kidney cancer among the highest on the planet, widespread anaemia, chronic respiratory disease, elevated infant mortality. Local doctors have been documenting these figures for decades. The causal link with the Aral disaster is clear enough that it is one of the most cited cases in environmental health research.

The North Sea and partial recovery

On the Kazakh side of the border, there is a more hopeful parallel story. The Kazakh government, with World Bank financial support, built a dam (the Kokaral Dike) in 2005 that separates the northern fragment of the lake from the rest. The result was immediate: the North Sea level rose several metres within a few years, salinity dropped, fish returned and the port of Aralsk — which had been left kilometres from the water — regained a shoreline.

The Uzbek South Sea has no solution in sight. The rivers that fed it are diverted to agriculture and there is no realistic plan to return them to the lake.

Nukus and the Savitsky Museum

Anyone travelling to the Aral inevitably passes through Nukus, the capital of Karakalpakstan. The city itself has little particular appeal, but it holds one of the most extraordinary museums in the world: the Igor Savitsky Karakalpakstan Art Museum.

Savitsky was a Russian artist and collector who arrived in Nukus in the 1950s to study the region’s archaeology and stayed for the rest of his life. Over the following decades, he travelled to the studios of Soviet avant-garde artists who had been silenced or persecuted under Stalinism — Socialist Realism did not tolerate Expressionism, Constructivism or abstraction — and persuaded them to give him their work. He stored it in Nukus, in the backside of the Soviet world, where no Moscow inspector came looking.

The result is a collection of more than ninety thousand pieces — paintings, sculptures, folk art, archaeology — that constitutes the second most important collection of Soviet avant-garde art in the world, after the Russian Museum in St Petersburg. Savitsky saved the art the system tried to destroy by hiding it in the most remote place he could find.

The Aral, the dry lakebed and the rusting boats of Moynaq are the consequence of what happens when a centralised system decides it knows better than nature how the world should be organised. The Savitsky Museum is the consequence of what happens when an individual decides that ideas are worth saving. The two extremes of that tension, a few hours apart at Uzbekistan’s northwest corner, make a journey to this region one of the most dense — intellectually and emotionally — that Asia can offer.

The complete Far Guides Uzbekistan guide includes detailed Silk Road routes, interactive maps and all the practical information you need to plan your independent trip.