The dams, canals, and other water works were built in order to transform the desert into agricultural fields for cotton and other crops. Fed primarily by snowmelt and precipitation from faraway mountains, the Aral Sea supported extensive fishing communities and a temperate oasis in a mostly arid region of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.But in the 1950s and 60s, the government of the Soviet Union launched projects that diverted the region’s two major rivers—the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya. In the process its surface level dropped by about 16 metres. Almost no water from the Amu Darya and the Syr … By 1992 the total area of the two parts of the Aral Sea had been reduced to approximately 13,000 square miles (33,800 square km), and the mean surface level had dropped by about 50 feet (15 metres). Some estimates suggest that the lake is just 10 percent of its original size.iPad users can view more images of the Aral Sea by downloading the free Though the Aral Sea has been steadily shrinking over the past decade, this true-color image from August 2010 shows slight growth in the southern sea as water flowed into it from the Amu Darya for the first time since 2008. Once the world’s fourth largest lake, the rapidly shrinking Aral Sea has fragmented into four bodies of water. By 2001, the southern connection had been severed, and the shallower eastern part retreated rapidly over the next several years. Blowing, salty dust from the exposed lakebed became a public health hazard and degraded the soil. The Aral Sea has been slowly disappearing ever since. Almost no water from the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya ever reached the Aral Sea anymore. The South Aral Sea, which consist of a strip of water in the west and a dried-out basin in the east, sits in Uzbekistan. The remnants of it nestle in the climatically inhospitable heart of Central Asia, to the east of the The Aral Sea depression was formed toward the end of the The Aral Sea area is characterized by a desert-continental climate that features wide-ranging diurnal air temperatures, cold winters, hot summers, and sparse rainfall. Especially large retreats in the eastern lobe of the South Aral Sea appear to have occurred between 2005 and 2009, when drought limited and then cut off the flow of the … The Southern Aral Sea and Tsche-Bas Gulf show the most dramatic change in 2011. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students.
The water level had dropped to 125 feet (36 metres) above sea level, and the water volume was reduced by three-fourths of what it had been in 1960. The increasingly salty water became polluted with fertilizer and pesticides. Northwesterly winds prevail in autumn and winter, and westerly and southwesterly winds are common in spring and summer.Until the 1960s the most-significant factors affecting the water balance of the Aral Sea were the rates of river inflow and water loss through evaporation, which formerly took out each year about the same amount of water that the rivers brought in. Vozrozhdeniye, translated as “renaissance” or “rebirth” island, was the home of biological weapons lab in 1966.

In any event, between 1960 and 2002, the surface area of the Aral Sea shrank by about 70% and its volume by 90%. As the lake dried up, fisheries and the communities that depended on them collapsed. An Argon reconnaissance satellite acquired this image of the Aral Sea on August 22, 1964, before the drop in water levels altered the shoreline and devastated surrounding communities.

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