88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Sins of the Aral Sea
Diverted to water crops, what was once a vast inland sea is 90 percent gone. Can it be revived?
Photograph by Carolyn Drake
Each of these boats used to haul in tons of fish every year. The fleet has been rusting near the former Uzbek port of Muynoq since the Aral dried up here in the 1980s.
Photograph by Carolyn Drake
In Kazakhstan a stretch of the former seabed has become a salt pan laced with cotton-farming chemicals.
Photograph by Carolyn Drake
The History Museum in Aral, Kazakhstan, displays a preserved bream—one of several species that vanished in the 1980s, when the once bountiful Aral Sea shriveled and divided into separate bodies. On the Kazakh side, a dam has revived fish. On the Uzbek side, only invertebrates remain.
Photograph by Carolyn Drake
A man prunes an elm tree in Kazanketken, Uzbekistan. Such drought-tolerant trees still line some of the dry irrigation ditches that once diverted water to enormous cotton farms from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers.
Photograph by Carolyn Drake
But in the Uzbek village of Kubla-Ustyurt, where the sea is almost gone, locals who once fished now rely on restricted hunting for income.
Photograph by Carolyn Drake
A Kazakh fisherman is carried to a boat in Tastubek, on the northern part of the Aral Sea. Thanks to a dam, fishing is still possible there.
Photograph by Carolyn Drake
In Tastubek, Kazakhstan, a fish with little commercial value bears the tire marks of a Russian jeep.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2...702=1#/04-muynoq-former-fishing-fleet-670.jpg
Diverted to water crops, what was once a vast inland sea is 90 percent gone. Can it be revived?
Photograph by Carolyn Drake
Each of these boats used to haul in tons of fish every year. The fleet has been rusting near the former Uzbek port of Muynoq since the Aral dried up here in the 1980s.
Photograph by Carolyn Drake
In Kazakhstan a stretch of the former seabed has become a salt pan laced with cotton-farming chemicals.
Photograph by Carolyn Drake
The History Museum in Aral, Kazakhstan, displays a preserved bream—one of several species that vanished in the 1980s, when the once bountiful Aral Sea shriveled and divided into separate bodies. On the Kazakh side, a dam has revived fish. On the Uzbek side, only invertebrates remain.
Photograph by Carolyn Drake
A man prunes an elm tree in Kazanketken, Uzbekistan. Such drought-tolerant trees still line some of the dry irrigation ditches that once diverted water to enormous cotton farms from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers.
Photograph by Carolyn Drake
But in the Uzbek village of Kubla-Ustyurt, where the sea is almost gone, locals who once fished now rely on restricted hunting for income.
Photograph by Carolyn Drake
A Kazakh fisherman is carried to a boat in Tastubek, on the northern part of the Aral Sea. Thanks to a dam, fishing is still possible there.
Photograph by Carolyn Drake
In Tastubek, Kazakhstan, a fish with little commercial value bears the tire marks of a Russian jeep.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2...702=1#/04-muynoq-former-fishing-fleet-670.jpg