The Aral Sea 咸海.pptVIP

* * The Aral Sea The Aral Sea Location Early Days Shrinkage Cause Effect Solution Outline Location The Aral Sea is a saline basin in Central Asia and it lies between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south. The name roughly translates as Sea of Islands, referring to more than 1,500 islands that once dotted its waters. Early Days Once among the four largest lakes of the world with an area of 68,000 square kilometers, The Aral Sea was especially prosperous in its fishing industry. Shrinkage The Aral Sea has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet Union irrigation projects. By 2007 it had declined to 10% of its original size, splitting into three lakes – the North Aral Sea and the eastern and western basins of the once far larger South Aral Sea. By 2009, the south-eastern lake had disappeared and the southwestern lake retreated to a thin strip at the extreme west of the former southern sea. The maximum depth of the North Aral Sea is 42 meters. Cause In 1918, the Soviet government decided that the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea, the Amu Darya in the south and the Syr Darya in the northeast, would be diverted to irrigate the desert, in order to attempt to grow rice, melons, cereals, and cotton. 30 million roubles(苏联卢布) was spent on the scheme, and Lenin(列宁) said that Irrigation will do more than anything else to revive the area and regenerate it, bury the past and make the transition to socialism more certain“. This was part of the Soviet plan for cotton, or white gold, to become a major export. This did eventually end up becoming the case, and today Uzbekistan is one of the worlds largest exporters of cotton. Actually, the disappearance of the lake was no surprise to the Soviets and they expected it to happen long before. As early as in 1964, Aleksandr Asarin at the Hydroproject Institute(水利工程学院) pointed out that the lake was doomed explaining, “It was part of the five-year plans, approved by