NO. 7
How To Make An Ocean Disappear
Humans have a hard time paying attention to things.
Actually, no. That’s not true.
Humans have a hard time paying attention to important things. Celebrity drama? Sure. We’ll spend a few hours scrolling Twitter for the juicy details. Conflict between politicians? Absolutely. We’ll glue ourselves to our TVs until the news anchors have run out of things to say.
(That part’s a fantasy. News anchors never run out of things to say.)
Broadly, however, we have a hard time focusing on what’s important. The ancient residents of Pompeii felt weeks of rumbling and shaking before the inevitable eruption, but many stayed anyway. The nuclear scientists at Chernobyl brazenly ignored a litany of red flags—until the inevitable happened.
But today, we’re not talking about Pompeii or Chernobyl.
We are talking about a place called the Aral Sea.
It used to be the fourth-largest lake in the world. Now it’s a chunk of desert in-between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, polka-dotted with ships that haven’t floated in decades. Among all the examples of humans losing the plot, the Aral Sea is the best example I know of to explain what happens when we stop paying attention. Of what happens when we optimize for the present above all else.
Now, for the matter at hand: How the hell did we dry up an entire sea?
(I’ll give you a hint: They did it on purpose. And you’ll find out why)
An AI render of what the Aral Sea might’ve looked like before it dried up.
If you could time travel back to the ‘50s—or any moment in history before then—you would’ve liked to visit the Aral Sea. It was teeming with life: fishermen would go out in the morning and come back in the evening with plenty to sell at the market. Seaside residents would take morning laps in the salt. Before dark the sun would burn red and orange across the desert, catching the glossy waves, wishing goodnight to everyone watching.
In a word, the Aral Sea was idyllic. Or something close to it.
If you’re not familiar with the geography of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (don’t worry, I wasn’t either before I started researching this), they are incredibly arid countries. Empty deserts stretch on as far as the eye can see, occasionally dotted with the odd village or two.
The spot where the Aral Sea was located is especially dry: It gets roughly the same amount of rain each year as Phoenix—the second-driest capital city in the U.S. In a climate like this, a sea is the closest thing there is to paradise.
And it was indeed something close to paradise, until the 1960s. And then…
Enter our story’s main antagonist: the Soviet Union.
One of the reasons you may not have heard of the Aral Sea tragedy is that, on the list of worrying things the Soviet Union was up to during the 1960s, water usage and irrigation ranks relatively low. Nonetheless, during all of their other shenanigans, the Soviet Union turned their eye to the Aral Sea.
. . .
“Here’s a very large body of water,” they might’ve said, “that we could drain.”
“Why would we do that?” some lowly intern might’ve made the mistake of asking.
“Why, so we can use the water for cotton farms.”
“W-why…do we need cotton farms?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“... no.”
“We need the cotton to make gunpowder.”
. . .
If you’re like me, you also had no idea that cotton could be used to make gunpowder. Oh, but it can. Not gunpowder, exactly, but guncotton: a gunpowder substitute created by dipping cotton in a few different types of acid, then washing the cotton with water.
So the Soviet Union wanted to make a lot of guncotton, and they began draining the Aral Sea to do it. As for the technical details, here’s your summary:
The Soviet government also knew that, if word of this got out, citizens might have some problems with it. Naturally. The sea was a gem and incredibly plentiful to fishermen, producing more than 50,000 tons of fish each year. So they kept it under wraps and tried to prevent anyone, and everyone, from knowing that they were about to destroy the world’s fourth-largest lake for… Gunpowder. Guncotton. Whatever.
And so, in the 60s, the draining of the Aral Sea began.
A 1960s-era Soviet Union story would not be complete without a horror movie-esque chemical weapons testing facility. And, as a matter of fact, there is one in this story: it’s a place called Vozrozhdeniya Island, and it was used by the U.S.S.R to test chemical weapons, like anthrax.
If we’re to go by the way the New York Times describes it, the place is straight out of a movie. Hazmat-like bodysuits litter the place, toxic smells linger in the air, hundreds of rusty cages—to hold animals for testing—lurk in the corners of the room. The place is a nightmare.
You may notice the problem here.
When the Aral Sea was thriving and full, the anthrax and other toxic chemicals were located on a secret island—and nobody had access to it, save members of the government. But the sea dried up. And then there was an abandoned chemical weapons testing island, still housing many dangerous items and creatures, that was perfectly-accessible by land and no longer guarded by anyone.
This posed a problem all on its own, but that’s a story for another day. Back to the main plot, now.
An AI interpretation of real photos from the Aral Sea—ships stranded on dry desert.
On its deathbed, during the 70s and 80s and 90s, the Aral Sea split into two. Slowly, these two lobes of the sea began to shrink. The remaining fish died out and dried in the desert sun, and once-waterfront villages now had sweeping views over a desert hellscape.
And, by the 2000s, the South Aral Sea was completely dry. At this point, if you wanted to commission a Borat-style movie on how to dry up the world’s fourth-largest lake in a matter of 40 years, you could have called up the project manager of this thing.
While there were projects aimed at restoring the sea in the 90s and early 2000s—with middling success, but encouraging in some cases—the real headway came in 2005, when the Kazakh government built a dam on the South Aral Sea. This dam prevented spillover into the now-hopeless South Aral sea, helping to preserve what was left of the north.
By 2006, boats in the North Aral sea were floating again, catching thousands of tons of fish per year. Nothing like it used to be, but small steps towards a resolution.
But there is a silver lining: The North Aral Sea has been partially-revived, and the situation continues to improve for locals and fishermen. The same cannot be said for the South Aral Sea, however, which serves as a reminder that blunders like this one—blunders which focus on unimportant objectives, optimizing for the present against all else—leave scars that never fully heal.
. . .
P.S. For anyone wondering, I am aware that the words “ocean” and “sea” mean different things, and that my usage of the word “ocean” in the title is technically incorrect. (Semantically not so much, since most people tend to use the words interchangeably). As this is the first edition of The Archive, and as “How To Make A Sea Disappear” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, I hope you’ll forgive me for my misappropriation of the word. Anyway. I tried to write this paragraph without sounding pretentious, and I’m reasonably confident I failed.
See you in my next essay, which will endeavor to treat the meanings of words with more respect (and which will likely fail).
Humans have a hard time paying attention to things.
Actually, no. That’s not true.
Humans have a hard time paying attention to important things. Celebrity drama? Sure. We’ll spend a few hours scrolling Twitter for the juicy details. Conflict between politicians? Absolutely. We’ll glue ourselves to our TVs until the news anchors have run out of things to say.
(That part’s a fantasy. News anchors never run out of things to say.)
Broadly, however, we have a hard time focusing on what’s important. The ancient residents of Pompeii felt weeks of rumbling and shaking before the inevitable eruption, but many stayed anyway. The nuclear scientists at Chernobyl brazenly ignored a litany of red flags—until the inevitable happened.
But today, we’re not talking about Pompeii or Chernobyl.
We are talking about a place called the Aral Sea.
It used to be the fourth-largest lake in the world. Now it’s a chunk of desert in-between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, polka-dotted with ships that haven’t floated in decades. Among all the examples of humans losing the plot, the Aral Sea is the best example I know of to explain what happens when we stop paying attention. Of what happens when we optimize for the present above all else.
Now, for the matter at hand: How the hell did we dry up an entire sea?
(I’ll give you a hint: They did it on purpose. And you’ll find out why)
I. The Aral Sea used to be a place you’d dream of visiting
An AI render of what the Aral Sea might’ve looked like before it dried up.
If you could time travel back to the ‘50s—or any moment in history before then—you would’ve liked to visit the Aral Sea. It was teeming with life: fishermen would go out in the morning and come back in the evening with plenty to sell at the market. Seaside residents would take morning laps in the salt. Before dark the sun would burn red and orange across the desert, catching the glossy waves, wishing goodnight to everyone watching.
In a word, the Aral Sea was idyllic. Or something close to it.
If you’re not familiar with the geography of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (don’t worry, I wasn’t either before I started researching this), they are incredibly arid countries. Empty deserts stretch on as far as the eye can see, occasionally dotted with the odd village or two.
The spot where the Aral Sea was located is especially dry: It gets roughly the same amount of rain each year as Phoenix—the second-driest capital city in the U.S. In a climate like this, a sea is the closest thing there is to paradise.
And it was indeed something close to paradise, until the 1960s. And then…
Enter our story’s main antagonist: the Soviet Union.
II. The Soviet Union gets a big idea, and it’s a bad one
One of the reasons you may not have heard of the Aral Sea tragedy is that, on the list of worrying things the Soviet Union was up to during the 1960s, water usage and irrigation ranks relatively low. Nonetheless, during all of their other shenanigans, the Soviet Union turned their eye to the Aral Sea.
. . .
“Here’s a very large body of water,” they might’ve said, “that we could drain.”
“Why would we do that?” some lowly intern might’ve made the mistake of asking.
“Why, so we can use the water for cotton farms.”
“W-why…do we need cotton farms?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“... no.”
“We need the cotton to make gunpowder.”
. . .
If you’re like me, you also had no idea that cotton could be used to make gunpowder. Oh, but it can. Not gunpowder, exactly, but guncotton: a gunpowder substitute created by dipping cotton in a few different types of acid, then washing the cotton with water.
So the Soviet Union wanted to make a lot of guncotton, and they began draining the Aral Sea to do it. As for the technical details, here’s your summary:
- The Aral Sea is fed by two rivers: the Syr & the Amu Dara. Both big, beautiful rivers, miracles of nature in their own right.
- The U.S.S.R. didn’t drain the sea directly. They drained these rivers, instead (it was easier to do it this way) and funneled the water to their cotton farms.
The Soviet government also knew that, if word of this got out, citizens might have some problems with it. Naturally. The sea was a gem and incredibly plentiful to fishermen, producing more than 50,000 tons of fish each year. So they kept it under wraps and tried to prevent anyone, and everyone, from knowing that they were about to destroy the world’s fourth-largest lake for… Gunpowder. Guncotton. Whatever.
And so, in the 60s, the draining of the Aral Sea began.
Interlude: There was a creepy, anthrax-ridden island in the sea
A 1960s-era Soviet Union story would not be complete without a horror movie-esque chemical weapons testing facility. And, as a matter of fact, there is one in this story: it’s a place called Vozrozhdeniya Island, and it was used by the U.S.S.R to test chemical weapons, like anthrax.
If we’re to go by the way the New York Times describes it, the place is straight out of a movie. Hazmat-like bodysuits litter the place, toxic smells linger in the air, hundreds of rusty cages—to hold animals for testing—lurk in the corners of the room. The place is a nightmare.
You may notice the problem here.
When the Aral Sea was thriving and full, the anthrax and other toxic chemicals were located on a secret island—and nobody had access to it, save members of the government. But the sea dried up. And then there was an abandoned chemical weapons testing island, still housing many dangerous items and creatures, that was perfectly-accessible by land and no longer guarded by anyone.
This posed a problem all on its own, but that’s a story for another day. Back to the main plot, now.
III. The death, and potential revival, of the Aral Sea
An AI interpretation of real photos from the Aral Sea—ships stranded on dry desert.
On its deathbed, during the 70s and 80s and 90s, the Aral Sea split into two. Slowly, these two lobes of the sea began to shrink. The remaining fish died out and dried in the desert sun, and once-waterfront villages now had sweeping views over a desert hellscape.
And, by the 2000s, the South Aral Sea was completely dry. At this point, if you wanted to commission a Borat-style movie on how to dry up the world’s fourth-largest lake in a matter of 40 years, you could have called up the project manager of this thing.
While there were projects aimed at restoring the sea in the 90s and early 2000s—with middling success, but encouraging in some cases—the real headway came in 2005, when the Kazakh government built a dam on the South Aral Sea. This dam prevented spillover into the now-hopeless South Aral sea, helping to preserve what was left of the north.
By 2006, boats in the North Aral sea were floating again, catching thousands of tons of fish per year. Nothing like it used to be, but small steps towards a resolution.
What do things look like today?
The Aral Sea has had obstacles since 2005. For example, in 2014, the eastern lobe of the South Aral Sea dried up completely for the first time in more than 600 years. And, as water levels continue to dwindle, people worry about diseases being spread from Vozrozhdeniya Island, the island the Soviet Union used for chemical testing.But there is a silver lining: The North Aral Sea has been partially-revived, and the situation continues to improve for locals and fishermen. The same cannot be said for the South Aral Sea, however, which serves as a reminder that blunders like this one—blunders which focus on unimportant objectives, optimizing for the present against all else—leave scars that never fully heal.
. . .
P.S. For anyone wondering, I am aware that the words “ocean” and “sea” mean different things, and that my usage of the word “ocean” in the title is technically incorrect. (Semantically not so much, since most people tend to use the words interchangeably). As this is the first edition of The Archive, and as “How To Make A Sea Disappear” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, I hope you’ll forgive me for my misappropriation of the word. Anyway. I tried to write this paragraph without sounding pretentious, and I’m reasonably confident I failed.
See you in my next essay, which will endeavor to treat the meanings of words with more respect (and which will likely fail).