World Landbridge (8) - The Aral Sea Project
- vor 14 Jahren
South of the Trans-Siberian Railway lies the Central Asian Desert, where vast transformations in the vein of NAWAPA are ripe for implementation. The project to revive the Aral Sea, which was proposed back in the 1940s by the Russian engineer Davydov, has been developed further since that time, and has recently been reactivated by Presidents Medvedev of Russia and Nazarbayev of Kazachstan.
The Aral Sea has shrunken dramatically since the 1960s and 70s, when, for the purposes of water-intensive, Soviet-planned cotton crops, water from the rivers Amu and Syr Darya was diverted in large amounts. The sea has been drying up at an accelerating rate. This has led to the destruction of fishery in the region, and a landstrip of about 80 to 300km around the sea has seen a massive retreat of rainfall and the advent of salt storms.
The potential solution to this condition lies many kilometers to the north, in the Altai mountains, where, at the border between Russia, Kazakhstan, China and Mongolia, the rivers Ob and Irtysh originate.
The Aral Sea has shrunken dramatically since the 1960s and 70s, when, for the purposes of water-intensive, Soviet-planned cotton crops, water from the rivers Amu and Syr Darya was diverted in large amounts. The sea has been drying up at an accelerating rate. This has led to the destruction of fishery in the region, and a landstrip of about 80 to 300km around the sea has seen a massive retreat of rainfall and the advent of salt storms.
The potential solution to this condition lies many kilometers to the north, in the Altai mountains, where, at the border between Russia, Kazakhstan, China and Mongolia, the rivers Ob and Irtysh originate.