Life Seeps Back Into the Aral Sea

The Aral Sea, once described as the world's worst ecological disaster after Soviet-era irrigation plans reduced its size by three-quarters, is returning to life thanks to a £48m project to restore its water supplies.

The lake, on the Russian-Kazakhstan border, was once the fourth-largest inland body of water in the world but a programme of irrigation for nearby cotton and vegetable farms saw it shrink from 26,000 square miles in 1960 to 6,600 square miles in 2004.

The disaster left fishing boats rusting in the dustbowl of the former lakebed, which agricultural chemicals that ran into the lake during the Soviet era were reported to have contaminated the dust and been linked to respiratory disease among the population bordering the former lake.

It has since divided into three separate lakes and seen its salinity go up from 10 grams to 45 grams per litre. Seawater has a salinity of 35 grams per litre.

But a World Bank-backed project to rehabilitate the Aral Sea by clearing the wasteful canal system and restoring the northern lake has already seen 300 square miles of the former seabed covered with water anew. Initial plans envisaged it would take up to a decade to reach this level.

Rebuilding of the canal system has redoubled the flow of the Syr Darya river, which feeds the northern half of the lake, the Washington Times reported.

In the former port of Aralsk, hospital doctor Marat Turelmulatov told the paper that the reappearance of fresh fish in markets ought to improve the health of residents.

"Before, we only had small amounts of fish from the lakes," he said. "The sea had become too salty for most species. But now, we're seeing fish from the sea in the markets."

"We have an epidemic of tuberculosis and we have chronic anaemia, and poor nutrition is a major component in both. With people eating more fresh fish, their health is going to improve," he said.

But hope that the entire lake could be restored is still far off. The southern portion of depends on the Amu Darya river, which is so heavily irrigated that its waters rarely reach the former shores of the lake.

The Qaraqum canal, which transports 3 cubic miles of water every year from the Amu Darya across the Karakum desert in Turkmenistan, loses up to 50% of its water every year.