The Ships Stranded in the Middle of a Desert

Outside Moynaq in Uzbekistan, fishing trawlers lie in the sand. Not on the shore, in the sand. The nearest water is more than a hundred kilometres away. The town was a port, and the boats stand where they were left when the sea withdrew.

In the 1960s the Aral Sea was the fourth-largest lake on Earth. Since then it has lost most of its volume, with estimates running up to ninety per cent. One body of water has broken into several remnant lakes separated by dry ground. What lies between them is a salt desert that now has a name of its own: the Aralkum.

Not a natural event

The decisive thing about this story is that it is not a natural disaster. The Aral Sea was fed by two rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. From the 1960s onward planners diverted their water into canals on a vast scale to grow cotton in the Central Asian steppe. The plan worked: harvests rose, and whole towns lived off the irrigation. The lake got what was left over. It was not enough.

The lake did not evaporate. It was diverted.

— TerraTally · Climate desk

The consequences went far beyond the missing water. As the lake retreated, the salinity of what remained rose so far that the fishery collapsed. Moynaq lost not only its harbour but the work the town had been built on. The exposed lake bed has been releasing dust ever since, loaded with salts and residues from farming, and the wind carries it across the region. Without the balancing effect of a large water surface, summers became hotter and winters colder. Anyone standing in Moynaq today sees both at once: the trawlers and a horizon without water.

In 2005 a dam thirteen kilometres long was completed in the north, the Kok-Aral dam, a joint undertaking by Kazakhstan and the World Bank. It holds the water of the Syr Darya in the northern remnant lake instead of letting it drain into the dried-out south. It thereby separates the northern Small Aral Sea from the large southern basin. The engineering behind it is unspectacular: a dam that regulates the outflow. What mattered was not the construction but the decision about which part of the lake the remaining river water should serve.

The result can be measured. The level of the Small Aral Sea rose, salinity fell, fish returned and with them part of the fishery. Boats go out again, even if from different places than before. This is not a restoration of the old lake. The large southern part remains largely lost, and Moynaq is still left dry.

That is exactly what sets it apart from the images the Aral Sea is famous for. The ships in the sand tell of a loss that looks final. The dam in the north tells something else: what a decision made disappear, a decision can partly bring back.