Name: What Happened to the Aral Sea? | Travel to Uzbekistan's Worst Disaster
Uploaded: 2022-10-21T18:40:38.000Z
Duration: 18 min 1 s
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And in this episode we'll be exploring one of the most unique places on earth:

We've spent the last week traveling to the Silk Road cities of Uzbekistan,

But now we're traveling to the northwestern corner of the country

to experience one of the worst ecological disasters on earth.

The Aral Sea was once the fourth largest inland sea.

Now, it's a giant desert bed full of rusting ships and broken dreams.

To find out, we're hopping in these trucks

from Nukus all the way to the water's edge.

Well, we have been driving for essentially the entire day.

We drove to Nukus,  switched vehicles into 4x4 vehicles,

This is essentially kind of the end of the road.

But we're staying at a little guest house.

and then go and take a look at the ship graveyard.

So we're sitting down to lunch right here.

We got some pickled food, some stew with lamb and potatoes and some tea.

that used to work in the fishing industry.

But like a lot of the local population, without that industry here,

We've been looking on Google Maps to just try

to put into perspective where we are because

we're kind of at the convergence of all of the "stans."

But we're in a place that's called the Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan, which means

I'm standing now at what used to be the bottom of the Aral Sea.

but the mayor cleaned up the place and sold the rest for scrap metal.

So there's only about ten that remain right here.

because the water used to be going as far back as you can see,

and now it's this kind of bizarre playground.

But to answer our question about how the Aral Sea disappeared in just a few decades,

we have to start with a story of the American Civil War.

The story of how these ships became marooned 100 kilometers from the Aral Sea

the United States grew rich on cotton grown in the South,

European textile industry for a very high price.

But when the American Civil War broke out,

and Europeans had to find a new supplier of cotton.

In step the Russian Czars who saw the perfect opportunity to fill the gap in the

market with their newly conquered lands in Central Asia,

which could be perfect for growing cotton,

if only they could get water into the desert.

So they diverted some of the rivers flowing into the Aral Sea without too much of an impact on the environment.

Lenin advocated for turning the area into a self-sufficient cotton belt of the Soviet Union saying,

"Irrigation will do more to revive the area and regenerate it and make the transition to socialism more certain."

In the 1930s Uzbekistan was exporting cotton worldwide,

Tourists actually came and visited the beaches here, and

the Soviet Union was the world's leading cotton producer

with over 70 percent of it coming from Uzbekistan,

irrigated by the rivers that flowed into the Aral Sea.

Then in the 1950s the Soviet government attempted an overly ambitious

irrigation project that tipped  the ecological scales too far.

the water levels here dropped 20 full meters

marooned and leaving the remaining seawater

By 1984 industry in the area had dried up, just like the lake,

leaving Moynak and its fishing fleet a ghost town.

It's just really hard to imagine that this was floating at one time

and that where we're standing was a body of water.

Well, now we have swung over to the museum,

So here behind me are some images from NASA that show how the sea has dried up over the years.

As you can see it not only shrinks in size, but also color.

It's actually a hundred thousand tons of salt that's been mixed up with all the chemicals and fertilizers and pesticides

that they used in irrigating the cotton fields that have made it basically poisonous,

It's been spread all the way around the world.

We are on a mission to get a bottle of vodka

and there's not a lot to do in ways of entertainment out here.

So vodka will have to check all the boxes.

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What Happened to the Aral Sea? | Travel to Uzbekistan's Worst Disaster

perspective

essentially

opportunity

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