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🚢 What happened to the Aral Sea

In 1960 the Aral Sea was the fourth largest lake on Earth, and its level was held by a ledger: about sixty cubic kilometres of water in each year, about sixty evaporated off. Follow what happened when cotton took the inflow column away — an

4
lessons
~20 min
to learn
Adults
level
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What you’ll learn

  1. A sea fed by two riversSet out the Aral Sea's water budget before 1960 and explain why a lake with no outlet depends entirely on what its rivers deliver.About 58 to 62 cubic kilometres of water arrived each year and about 60 evaporated away. That near-match held a lake of 66,000 square kilometres steady, and it is the only thing that was holding it.
  2. The irrigation cascadeTrace the chain from Soviet cotton policy to canal, to lost river flow, to rising salt, to a fishery that ended while the lake still looked full.Irrigated land in the basin grew from 4.5 to nearly 7 million hectares between 1960 and 1980. River inflow fell from 50 cubic kilometres a year to zero, and commercial fishing ended in 1982.
  3. When the seabed became weatherExplain how an exposed lake bed becomes an active dust source, and what that dust does to climate, farmland and health downwind.The Aralkum is a desert with a known birthday. Its salt-rich sediment travels hundreds of kilometres, and the region's older sandy deserts stay quiet while it does.
  4. One basin, one partial recoveryDescribe what the Kok-Aral dam achieved in the North Aral, in measured numbers, and why the same fix cannot be applied to the southern basin.The North Aral rose four metres, halved its salinity and rebuilt a fishery within a few years. The southern basin's eastern lobe disappeared entirely in 2014.

Questions this course answers

The Aral Sea had no outlet to any ocean. What set its water level?

Roughly 58 to 62 cubic kilometres arrived each year from rivers, groundwater and rain; about 60 evaporated. The level held while those two figures matched.

Which two rivers supplied almost all of the Aral Sea's inflow?

Both rise in the mountains of Central Asia and cross desert to reach the lake. Between them they delivered about 47 to 50 cubic kilometres a year before diversion.

Vozrozhdeniya, a large island in the Aral, joined the mainland around 2001. Why?

The island never moved. The falling lake exposed the channel floor, and by 2001 the last water between island and shore had gone.

What happened to the water reaching the Aral Sea between 1965 and the early 1980s?

Irrigation upstream intercepted the rivers. Evaporation off the lake carried on at about 60 cubic kilometres a year regardless, so the lake had to pay the difference out of its own volume.

Why did the Aral Sea get saltier as it shrank?

The same salt stayed in a smaller and smaller volume. Concentration climbed from about 10 grams per litre in 1960 to more than 100 by the 2000s.

Commercial fishing on the Aral ended in 1982. What does that date tell you?

In 1982 there was still a great deal of water in the Aral. It was simply too salty for the species that lived there, and the catch had already fallen 75 percent by 1977.

Grounded in trusted sources

  • Micklin P (2007). The Aral Sea Disaster. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 35:47-72 (doi:10.1146/annurev.earth.35.031306.140120)
  • FAO (2012). AQUASTAT Transboundary River Basin Overview - Aral Sea. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome
  • World Bank (2011). Implementation Completion and Results Report, Syr Darya Control & Northern Aral Sea Phase I Project (P046045), Report No. ICR0000874
  • World Bank (2019). Concept Project Information Document, North Aral Sea Development and Revitalization Project (P170187), Report No. PIDC26485
  • NASA Earth Observatory. World of Change: Shrinking Aral Sea (science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/world-of-change/aral-sea)
  • NASA Earth Observatory (2003). The Shrinking Aral Sea (science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/the-shrinking-aral-sea-1396)
  • NASA Earth Observatory (2014). The Aral Sea Loses Its Eastern Lobe, image of 19 August 2014 (earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/84437)
  • USGS EROS. Earthshots: Islands in the Aral Sea (eros.usgs.gov/earthshots/islands-the-aral-sea)

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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