Formerly the fourth largest lake in the world with an area of 68,000 km2, the Aral Sea has been shrinking since the 1960s. By 1997, it had declined to 10% of its original size, splitting into four lakes. Satellite images by NASA in August 2014 revealed that for the first time in modern history the eastern basin had completely dried up.
About Aral Sea in brief
Formerly the fourth largest lake in the world with an area of 68,000 km2, the Aral Sea has been shrinking since the 1960s. By 1997, it had declined to 10% of its original size, splitting into four lakes. Satellite images by NASA in August 2014 revealed that for the first time in modern history the eastern basin had completely dried up. In an ongoing effort in Kazakhstan, the Dike Kokaral dam was completed in 2005. By 2008, the water level had risen 12 m above that of 2003. Salinity has dropped, and fish are again present in sufficient numbers for some fishing to be viable. Despite its former vast size, theAral Sea had relatively low indigenous biodiversity. Native fish species of the lake included ship sturgeon, Aral trout, northern pike, ide, asp, common rudd, Turkestan barbel, and Eurasian ruffe. All other native fish barring the stickleback have also extirpated, but have returned to the North Sea following the recovery from the 1990s. The Amu Darya river flowed into the Caspian Sea via the Uzboy channel until the Holocene. The region’s once-prosperous fishing industry has been devastated, bringing unemployment and economic hardship. The water from the diverted Syr Darya River is used to irrigate about two million hectares of farmland in the Ferghana Valley. The Aral sea region is heavily polluted, with consequent serious public health problems.
UNESCO has added historical documents concerning the ArAl Sea to its Memory of the World Register as a resource to study the environmental tragedy. The maximum depth of the North AralSea was 42 m (the maximum depth in the South Aralsea was 42 metres) The Aralkum Desert is now called the Aralkums Desert, after the name of one of the lakes in the eastern part of the region. The lake’s first planktivorous fish, the zlankton, were the first to survive in the lake, leading to a collapse of the population of plankton. The first plankts were the Baltic herring, big-scale sand smelt, black-scale smelt and goby monkey goby. The fish are now recovering, and the lake’s population of goby is increasing. The aral sea is now the most biodiverse lake on the planet, with a population of over 1,100 species of fish. It was once the largest lake on Earth, but has now been reduced to just over 10%. It is now home to a small number of fish species, such as the sturgeons and the common carp, which are now possibly extinct due to their restricted range and dams now block their return and migration routes. It is also home to several species of freshwater fish, including the aral trout and Aral barbel. It has been called “one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters” by UNESCO.
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This page is based on the article Aral Sea published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 09, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
