“The government of Kazakhstan is replenishing its portion of the Aral Sea, which was the world’s fourth-largest lake before it was largely emptied by Soviet irrigation projects,” resulting in a vast, sometimes toxic, desert. “According to a recent statement from the Kazakh president, over the past 20 years, the water volume in the North Aral Sea has nearly doubled,” reports The Doomslayer.
Euronews explains:
Restoration efforts including a dam and water use controls are helping Kazakhstan revive part of the shrinking Aral Sea.
For decades the shrinking Aral Sea has been the poster child for environmental catastrophe. Behind images of rusty fishing boat shells sitting awkwardly among the sand dunes lies a story of human recklessness…Once the fourth largest lake on Earth, the Aral Sea is fed by two rivers that originate in the high mountains of Central Asia.
In the 1960s, the Soviet government decided to plant cotton fields on enormous swathes of land in the region, and the rivers were diverted for irrigation. The Aral Sea’s water supplies soon began to dwindle.
By the mid-2010s, it had lost around 90 per cent of its water mass. The lake split into four smaller bodies of very salty water, devastating local communities and ecosystems. The South Aral Sea, in Uzbekistan, all but disappeared leaving behind a toxic salty desert, known as the Aralkum.
Due to 20 years of systematic efforts, the surface area of the Northern Aral grew by 36 per cent, the water volume nearly doubled, and salinity decreased by half.
In what was once the South Aral Sea, Uzbekistan is planting a salt-resistant forest in a desert to prevent toxic salt storms and reclaim the land from its barren state. That desert used to be part of the Aral Sea, a massive salt lake. But it dried out when the Soviet Union’s communist government diverted waters flowing into it, to irrigate endless cotton fields. The Soviets chose to grow only cotton in much of the region, rather than less thirsty crops that consume less water. An ecological catastrophe resulted.
Forests are expanding in much of the world. The European Union has added an area the size of Cambodia to its woodlands. Costa Rica has 150% more forest than it did in 1987.
“Since 1949, China’s forest cover has grown from 10 percent of its land area to 25 percent, partly thanks to government efforts to halt desertification. The reforestation has been so extensive that it has altered the country’s water cycle,” reports The Doomslayer.
China has built a “Great Green Wall” of vegetation, but sandstorms still reach China’s capital city.
The replacement of horses with automobiles saved New England’s forests, which had mostly disappeared by 1910, but now cover much of the region. Today, Vermont is 78% forested, but in 1910, it was mostly un-forested.
