The Sea That Was Drained

[A] In 1960 the Aral Sea, lying between what are now Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was the fourth largest lake in the world. Fishing fleets worked out of ports along its shore, and a cannery in Aralsk employed several thousand people. [B] Within forty years most of the water was gone, and photographs of rusting trawlers standing on dry sand had become the standard image of environmental collapse.

[C] What happened was not an accident of climate. Two rivers fed the sea, and from the 1950s onward both were diverted into canals to irrigate cotton, a crop that needs a great deal of water and does not grow in that region without it. The engineers who designed the scheme understood that the sea would shrink; they regarded the loss as an acceptable price for a cotton industry. [D] What they appear not to have anticipated was the speed of the secondary effects. As the water retreated it left behind a salt plain, and wind carried that salt onto the very fields the canals were built to irrigate. The fishery collapsed, the local climate grew harsher, and the soil the project depended on began to poison itself.