A Dead Sea?

Once the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, the Aral Sea is quickly disappearing. Will Central Asia's once-prosperous fishery soon become a dead sea?

photos & story by eric freedman

Scrub and the heavily polluted sand of the former bed of the once-fertile, now-dying Aral Sea stretch geyond the horizon near Muynak, Uzbekistan.

Muynak, Uzbekistan — I’ve visited ghost towns but this was the first time I saw a ghost sea with a ghost fleet.

When we hear the phrase “graveyard of ships,” those of us who live by oceans or near the Great Lakes envision treacherous waters and sunken wrecks, Davy Jones’ locker and chill depths. In the arid Central Asian outpost of Muynak, however, “graveyard of ships” means a fleet abandoned to rust and ruin when the shore receded and receded and receded. It means fishing and supply ships atilt and mired in sand on the outskirts of town, with odd scraps of useless cables and ropes and maritime machinery parts scattered around.

Crusty sand crunches beneath our feet as we wander through the graveyard. This ship supplied fresh water and fuel oil, said my escort, Nespipbay Aristanbaev, indicating one rusted ghost, its deck hot to touch in the late-morning sun of a June day. That one used to be one of the best boats, he said of a tug, indicating another ghost.

Aristanbaev stands solemnly next to the ghost named Karakalpakiya, the Cyrillic letters of its name faded but legible upon the hull, the words “Muynak Fishport” in Russian still visible on its stern. As a young man, it was upon the Karakalpakiya that he sailed, a ship that went to sea for as long as 15 days at a time. So many years later, now at the age of 54, how does he feel when he comes here? Is there still pain, still loss? “Of course I’m very sad to see this,” he replied. “It’s not very pleasant.”

‘This was the Aral Sea’

The evening before, I stood atop the roof of the Academy of Sciences in Nukus, the capital of Uzbekistan’s Karakalpakstan region. From eight floors up, I looked down at the Amur Darya River, hobbled by two years of drought but much fuller after the spring rains. If I could have seen 130 miles to the northwest, I would have spotted the once-bustling fishing port and holiday resort town of Muynak. If I could have seen another 60 miles beyond that, I’d have glimpsed the ever-receding shores of the Aral.

The world press has reported widely on this eco-disaster, but I need to know more than pictures show and printed words tell, so I head to Muynak. Even in this region of vast deserts and few people, Muynak lies at the back of the back and beyond the beyond. How do you get to this isolated pinprick on the map?

Head north from Nukus. Not far from the city limits, cross the Amur Darya, now perhaps one-tenth its former width, perhaps less. Our driver Achat recalls his childhood in the 1960s before a bridge spanned this spot: “We crossed with the help of boats. It took 15 to 20 minutes to cross it.” Beyond the bridge, a woman leads a donkey cart loaded with fresh-cut brush.

The terrain is flat, flat, flat. One of the highest points, generously called a hill, is the site of the Nukus cemetery. Brush, sand and scrub cover most of the land, interrupted now and then by cotton fields and rice paddies, some active, some fallow. White salt leached from the soil patches on the ground. Parallel to the road runs a parade of telephone poles and dry riverbeds. Some sections of ditches and canals are dry, others carry water for irrigation.

Caravan memories. We pass a camel on the road, then see two camels grazing not far beyond. Our Daiwoo Nexia — a Korean car built in Uzbekistan — weaves slowly among oncoming cattle, herded by a donkey-riding cowboy holding a quirt and wearing a skullcap. Dozens of goats on the edge of the road walk closely together like kindergartners heading to the park.

Anomalies. As we near Muynak, a biplane flies low over the fields and the sign at the city’s entrance shows a fish. Painted in Uzbekistan’s national colors, a retired fishing boat whose name means “strong” in Russian stands sentry near the front of the hakimiyat or city hall, a monument to the past, not a symbol of the future.

This was once a prosperous fishing port. But decades of economic, agricultural and ecological misplanning have caused what was once the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water to shrink like an irreversibly leaking balloon. The nongovernmental organization Union for Defense of the Aral Sea and the Amur Darya describes the situation bluntly:
“The original surface area of 65,000 square kilometers — equal to the combined surface area of the Netherlands and Belgium — has shrunk by 70 percent so far, and the waters of the Aral Sea still continue to recede. What was once a sea has now been reduced to a dry and polluted desert.”

Randy Yeip / EJ

For a sense of how far the shore has moved from Muynak, imagine that Grand Rapids, Mich., sat on the coast of Lake Michigan only 20 years ago and that along the coast, Grand Haven, Muskegon, Ludington and Holland were deep, deep, deep in the lake.

From what was once the edge of a high waterfront ledge, Nespipbay Aristanbaev points out at a wasteland of sand and scrub, bleak and arid, stretching further than my eyes can see. “This was the Aral Sea,” he said quietly.

Decentralizing, destabilizing

The Aral was once so rich a fishery that in the midst of the Bolshevik Revolution toward the end of World War I, its fish literally powered the railways of the region then known as Turkestan. When wood became unavailable, “the railways were faced with a great difficulty, and solved it in an extraordinary fashion, which I could not have believed had I not seen it,” wrote Danish diplomat A. H. Brun, who was stationed there as a neutral overseer of conditions for Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war whom Russia held in the region. “They heated their boilers by means of dried sturgeon from Lake Aral. These fish are extremely fat and oily, and served remarkably well as fuel.”

So how did the Aral get turned upside down?

First a bit of background: Central Asia remained largely out of Western consciousness until the bombing of Afghanistan began in October 2001. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and three neighboring former Soviet republics were thrust into independence in 1991 when the USSR imploded. Suddenly economic and environmental planning — or misplanning — centralized for seven decades in Moscow, was decentralized.

When Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan became independent, the sea that straddles their border was already the stage for one of the world’s major ecological disaster stories.
Experts disagree on details – is it now half its original size, or a third or only a quarter? Did it plummet from the fourth-largest inland body of water in the world to seventh or even lower, to tenth?

However, there is consensus on the reasons for the dramatic change. Call it unsustainable development if you will. The primary reason: massive diversion of water for irrigation from the two rivers that feed the Aral, the Amur Darya and Syr Darya. A Soviet legacy, what is one of the world’s largest irrigation systems struggles to quench the insatiable thirst of the cotton industry, Uzbekistan’s largest export crop, and to produce rice. That system expanded beyond the ecologically sound limits of the rivers, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. That same diversion is also to blame for the devastating health effects from the chemical mess left from pesticides and fertilizers, which were exposed as the water disappeared and easily airborne in Karakalpakstan’s windy climate.

A tense situation

My driver Achat has his own Muynak memories. As a teenager, he and a friend spent three days at a government-operated resort here. “The sea was very close. We swam.” That resort attracted vacationers from Moscow and Leningrad, and “I saw many famous people, ministers, rich people.”

No more.

Now? As ecologist-biologist Bekdijan Tashmukhamedov of the Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences in Tashkent told independent journalists in a writing workshop I led, “The ecological situation in Uzbekistan is quite tense because 50 percent of the land is salinated. There is a lack of water. It creates tension.” As for the Aral, “it’s almost dead. Biological life in the Aral Sea is dead.” And a researcher who analyzes chemical contaminants and health-related organisms for the academy’s Institute of Water Problems, put it this way: “At present we have been a witness of catastrophic (human) influence on the Aral Sea Basin.”

The impacts include 100,000 jobs lost in the fishing and fish processing industry, toxic runoff from pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, an altered climate, destruction of wetlands and wildlife habitat, elevated poverty levels and one of the world’s highest rates of respiratory-diseases. Along the northern part of the sea in Kazakhstan, remnants of a fishing industry survive though it requires an hour-long drive to reach the shore.

Randy Yeip / EJ

Massive social and cultural relocation is occurring as well, according to Anthony Kolb, a University of Michigan demographer who is in Uzbekistan to study the changing population dynamics of migration from the Aral area. Families without jobs and livelihoods are heading to the cities. What about those who stay? Kolb, who works through the humanitarian organization Medecins Sans Frontieres, cites their health problems relating to kidney disease — “few people in the world drink water this salty” — and to frequent dust storms that saturate the air with salt and chemicals.

A receding population

We drop in without an appointment at the hakimiyat. There, the regional governor, Jarilquap Tursinbekov, talked about Muynak’s past (glorious), present (marginal) and future (uncertain, though he sounded politically optimistic). Like the Aral itself, the city’s population has shrunk to about 13,000. Many who left were ethnic Russians who once accounted for almost half the residents. “Most of them used to do fishing and working with fish. Here they had a big fish factory but now it doesn’t operate. The sea has been going away since 1985,” Tursinbekov said. “The fishing economy collapsed since that time.”

What’s life like in Muynak today? “Unemployment is everywhere,” the governor answered. “We had no water for the last two years and didn’t sow any crops.” People get by on government pensions or aid, by working on construction of a water management project or, in some cases, by leaving the country to take seasonal jobs in Kazakhstan. International nongovernmental organizations including UNICEF and the Red Cross have come to town to work on water pumps, a tuberculosis hospital and other projects.

There was some relief in 2002 after a wet spring brought water to ease the drought. “We hope water will come every year and people will stay here,” the governor said.
A glossy 1977 Russian wall map in his office showed Muynak perched on the southern shore of the Aral, with jagged peninsulas jutting into the water and small islands offshore. As I start to leave the office, I point to several inland lakes on the map. The governor shook his head, saying, “Nyet, nyet.”

Only Artifacts remain

A short drive from the graveyard of ships is a small local museum, actually a large room in a school building. A stuffed owl perched on a rusted anchor. Exhibits included baskets made of soft reeds to hold fish, nets, fishing hooks, ship models, sharks’ teeth, sea shells — artifacts of a lifestyle lost. Black-and-white photos in an album showed the cannery in full operation — stacks of thousands of cans, conveyor belts loaded with fish, processing equipment, boats unloading, workers. Paintings on the walls are labeled “fixing the ships,” “fisherman’s ship,” “drying of the nets,” “Ataw Island settlement” and “canned fish plant.”

Nespipbay Aristanbaev pointed to a painting of the port where he worked as a schoolboy. “During holidays I helped my parents to fish. It was for money.” Waving his left hand, he added, “There is no water now.”

The plight of the Aral is drawing international experts, teams of scientists and economists, nongovernmental organizations, grants galore. Periodically, government officials even float a bizarre proposal to divert water from two Siberian rivers and carry it by canals to the Aral basin — a fairy tale, insisted Yusup Kamalov, head of the Union for Defense of the Aral Sea and Amur Darya — a sort of political game that makes no sense economically or ecologically.

The abandoned remains of the once-prosperous Aral Sea fishing fleet rust and decay under the harsh Central Asian sun.

No, Kamalov continued, the problem isn’t a water shortage — he labeled that a myth. “It’s not real. It’s used as a political tool. We do have more than enough water in the region.” No, he asserted, the problem is the failure to knock down political and economic barriers that prevent its wise allocation.

“Technically it’s possible to provide clean water, quality water, and to save the Aral Sea,” he said. He talked of freeing farmers from government controls and letting them compete with each other, of setting prices for water as incentives to use it carefully, of establishing a government insurance fund to protect farmers in times of drought or natural disaster. He talked of the need for national governments to cooperate and coordinate. He talked of covering canals to curb evaporation and water loss: “We are losing in irrigation canals at least 40 percent of the water. Why not spend some money to cover some of them?”

‘If water comes…’

There is one visible sign of optimism in Muynak: A new college building, painted bright blue. Yet the color is a reminder of the sea that lapped here less than a lifetime ago. And ironically, the college that specializes in the study of transportation is visible from the graveyard of abandoned ships that will never again transport anything but memories and regrets.

As for Aristanbaev, why has he stayed in Muynak? “I was born here and love the region. If water comes, everything will be OK here.”

Sadly that’s untrue. More water can’t restore the Aral, and the people of Muynak will never take to ships again to fish.

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