‘Most staggering disaster of the 20th century’ now offers Instagrammable photo ops for curious Aral Sea tourists
- The slow destruction of Central Asia’s Aral Sea, a result of Soviet planners’ focus on cotton production, had terrible consequences for local communities
- Uzbekistan’s former fishing town of Moynaq, now 150km from the sea, is full of grimly photogenic evidence that the tide has long gone out for the area
On the western outskirts of the regional capital of Nukus, an unlovely Soviet-era creation in the far west of Central Asia’s Uzbekistan, the road out of town crosses a long bridge over what appears to be a sandy wasteland in which low shrubs struggle to survive.
But after some distance, this turns out to be the bed of the formerly mighty Amu Darya, or Oxus, one of Asia’s longest rivers, now reduced to a relative trickle. Its headstream rises 2,500km (1,550 miles) to the southeast, on the border of Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
The river once emptied into the vast but shallow inland Aral Sea, a haven of life on the largely arid Central Asian steppe, straddling the border of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
Limited local rainfall was insufficient to replace volume lost to evaporation, and the Amu Darya, along with the Syr Darya, or Jaxartes, swelled the Aral and kept it alive.
But Soviet planners decided that cotton would be the economic salvation of Uzbekistan, and vast volumes of water from both rivers were diverted to irrigation channels to turn areas of the surrounding Kyzylkum and Karakum deserts to cotton production.
A sign at the bridge indicates that the fishing town of Moynaq is a 198km drive away, to the northwest. But as neither river now reaches the Aral, the edge of the sea - formerly the planet’s fourth-largest inland body of fresh water - is now 150km beyond what was once landlocked Uzbekistan’s only port.
