He Lake AraHe is a grim mirror of the disaster that awaits our world if we are not able to preserve the environment. The city of Moynaqnorthwest of Uzbekistan, is the epicenter of the devastation that has caused the disappearance of a lake that in 1960 was 68,000 square kilometers … and that in 2007 it had lost 90% of its surface. Hundreds of ships stranded in the desert testify to what was an extensive region where fishing and agriculture flourished and where now there is only dust and contaminated earth. An image that anticipates the Apocalypse predicted by the prophets of pessimism.
You only have to walk a few kilometers from the old port of Moynaq to come across hundreds of fishing boats lying like rusty skeletons in the sand. They have been there for decades and look like they were carved by the hand of a whimsical artist. Drought and lack of humidity contribute to the preservation of these ghosts that emerge from the past. It is not difficult to access its bowels and find the remains of its old engines and rigging.
Located between Uzbekistan and KazakhstanTo the north, the so-called Aral Sea, although it was freshwater, had been formed over hundreds of thousands of years by the confluence of the channels of two great rivers in an enormous valley: the Amu Daria and the Sir Daria. Everything changed in 1959 when the Soviet Union decided by decree of the Politburo to create the largest cotton industry in the world in the region.
The collapse of the ecosystem turned the old orchard into a vacant sandy area in parallel with the collapse of the Soviet Union
Canals were built to irrigate the cottonwhich caused the water level to drop at a rate of 10 centimeters a year in the 1970s. In the 1990s, the lake dropped one meter every twelve months. And in 2007 it was already a lifeless desert. Hundreds of species of insects, birds and fish disappeared. The fishermen had to abandon their boats and the fishing of the sturgeon and the flounder. He caviara source of income for the area, stopped flowing.
Moynaq, with 12,000 inhabitants, is a city in decline that longs for the times of prosperity when fishing and grain cultivation raised the population’s standard of living. At the entrance, there is a huge triangular metal structure with the name of the town and a blue medallion that reproduces the image of a sturgeon. It is impossible to imagine if you don’t know the history that very close there was a sea that fed thousands of families.
Today only the parched and contaminated land due to pesticides and salinity that multiplied by four when its waters were diverted. Not only the animal species suffered, but also the men who lived on the banks of the Aral, who suffered from a plague of diseases starting in the 1990s. The collapse of the ecosystem turned the old orchard into a vacant sandy area in parallel with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The authorities of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are today trying to reverse the impact of the disaster. A dam has been built to raise reserves and the deterioration appears to have slowed. The northern area of the lake has recovered a few centimeters, but the southern part is practically dry. The Amu Daria, which rises in the Pamir mountain range, navigable for 1,400 kilometers, has been able to supply the historical flow that nourished the great lake.
The devastation has become a spectacle in Moynaq, where hundreds of tourists arrive every day to see those ships stranded in the desert that seem to have come out of a nightmare and that remember what the city was like just half a century ago.
#Boats #desert
