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Evan Mitchell

Professor Karlin

ENSC 103

11/1/11

Environmental Events

Event: Aral Sea Disaster Lecture

Sponsor: Environmental Science Dept.

Date/Time/Location: 10/27/11, 3:45pm, Friends Hall

Speakers: Murad Askarov, Michael Edelstein and others

For the environmental experiential component of the intro to environmental

science class, I chose to attend one of the lectures in Friends Hall regarding the Aral

Sea which were assigned originally as a replacement assignment for the cancelled

class. The first speaker is a native of Uzbekistan, which is where the Aral Sea is

located. He discussed the history of the sea and gave an overview of the disaster itself.

The Aral Sea, early in the 20th Century, was the worlds fourth-largest inland body of

fresh water. There were two rivers that flowed into the sea, of which whose courses the

Soviet government decided to divert in order to irrigate their crops. This began the

construction of irrigation canals, which greatly abused the rivers and, in turn, the Aral

Sea. As a result, the water level in the sea greatly dropped, the area of the sea itself

exponentially decreased, and its salt concentration increased dramatically. With the

increased salt content, marine life in the sea began to die off and the fishing industry of

the surrounding towns suffered, and still does. Today, the town of Muynak, which used

to be so dependent on the Aral sea and had such easy access to it, is now essentially a

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desert, very far from what is left of the sea and its once-thriving activity is no more. As if

that were bad enough, over twenty of the species of fish that used to call the Aral Sea

home are now extinct. Measures must be taken to prevent the sea from drying up

completely because if it does, billions of tons of salt will be left behind and, most

obviously, the freshwater source will be gone. Experts are looking to find solutions to

this problem. Some things they have come up with are, but not limited to improving the

quality of the canals, charging farmers to use the water, installing dams, or even going

so extreme as to take water from a nearby sea, dilute it, and then pump the newly fresh

water back into the Aral Sea.

The main speaker was somewhat difficult to understand with his accent, but i got

the gist of what he was trying to say. I agree that extreme measures should be taken to

fix the problem. It is really a shame that such careless planning led to not only the

extinction of twentyspecies of fish, but it put the fishing industry as a whole out of

business. Sure, the Soviets got the cotton they wanted but it was at a very high and

dangerous cost.