Video: Environmental disaster - the work of human hands: a ship graveyard on the shore of the drying up Aral Sea
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The uneasy relationship between man and nature is a burning and always relevant topic. Sometimes it seems that homo sapiens lives according to the principle: after me - even a flood. And in the case of the infamous Aral Sea - even a drought! Once one of the largest salt lakes in Central Asia, today it has turned into a shallow "puddle", and the city of Muynak, located on its coast, is a graveyard of rusting ships …
Not so long ago, on the site Kulturologiya.ru, we already wrote about abandoned anchors on the island of Tavira, where there used to be a busy fishing port, but now everything is overgrown with grass. A similar story happened with the city of Muynak, which is located on the shores of the Aral Sea in the Karakalpak Republic, it was famous for its rich catches of fish: the daily catch here was about 160 tons.
After Lake Muynak dried up, it turned out to be 150 km from the coast. The cause of the ecological disaster is simple - human vanity. In the 1940s, Soviet engineers launched a large-scale irrigation program in the Kazakh desert to grow rice, melons, grains and cotton. It was decided to take water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers feeding the Aral Sea. By 1960, 20 and 60 cubic kilometers of water were required annually for irrigation, which naturally led to the shallowing of the lake. From that moment on, the sea level decreased with an increasing rate from 20 to 80-90 cm / year. In 1989, the sea split into two isolated bodies of water - the North (Small) and South (Big) Aral Sea.
During the heyday, there were about 40,000 jobs on the Aral Sea coast, and fishing and fish processing accounted for one-sixth of the entire fishing industry in the Soviet Union. Gradually, all this fell into decay, the population dispersed, and those who remained suffer from serious chronic diseases caused by environmental pollution, as well as from sudden changes in temperature. Today the South Sea is irretrievably lost, the projects of scientists are aimed at saving the North Sea, however, despite this, the prospects of the lake remain uncomfortable.
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