Transcript 0:25 · Way out in the wilds of Central Asia, on the Kazakh-Uzbek border, lies the toxic remains 0:31 · of a dying sea. 0:32 · For thousands of years, this sea was a lifegiver, bringing food, trade, and civilization. 0:38 · Covering an area the size of Ireland, it was the fourth largest freshwater lake in the 0:42 · world. 0:43 · But then, in the middle of the 20th Century, something happened. 0:47 · An irrigation project went wrong, depriving the sea of vital water. 0:51 · In its place came toxic chemicals, poisons, and shores of unbreathable dust. 0:56 · Today, the sea is so deadly it's been called the Silent Chernobyl. 1:01 · But you likely know it by another name: the Aral Sea, the Soviet Union's greatest natural 1:06 · disaster. 1:08 · Beginning in 1948, Moscow diverted water away from the rivers feeding the sea towards agriculture. 1:13 · The plan was to make Central Asia into a fertile land of plenty. 1:18 · Instead, it triggered an environmental catastrophe so staggering we still don't know it's 1:24 · true toll. 1:25 · From an ancient oasis to a modern desert ravaged by cancer-causing storms, this is the story 1:32 · of the Aral Sea… and the bygone empire that killed it. 1:36 · The Ancient Sea Two and a half thousand years ago, Alexander 1:43 · the Great stood on the shores of the surging river, surveying the waters. 1:49 · Behind him lay the vast swathe of land he and his armies had overrun. 1:53 · Ahead lay an unknown frontier, a wilderness of tribes and bandits and harsh desert stretching 1:59 · out as far as the eye could see. 2:01 · As Alexander stood at the farthest northern extent of his ancient empire, little did he 2:06 · know that this wasn't the end of the world. 2:09 · That the river before him led not to empty wasteland, but to an expanse of water so vast 2:15 · it dominated the horizon. 2:16 · Today, we know that expanse as the Aral Sea. 2:20 · First appearing some 11,000 years ago, the existence of the Aral Sea was a pleasing historical 2:25 · mistake. 2:26 · At the very end of the Neogene Period - a period of time so far back we might as well 2:31 · just call it Long Ago BC - a depression formed in Central Asia on the border area of modern-day 2:37 · Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. 2:40 · And there it remained for millions of years, doing nothing but being all low and depressing, 2:46 · until the Amu Darya decided to change course. 2:50 · Since time immemorial, the Amu Darya had flowed into the vast Caspian Sea to the west. 2:55 · But now it began to flow instead into the Aral Depression. 3:00 · As it flowed, the depression began to fill up. 3:02 · Began to look less like a depressing dip in the landscape… 3:06 · ...and more like a lake. 3:08 · From this chance hydrological event, the Aral Sea was born. 3:12 · By the time Alexander the Great made it to the shores of the second river feeding it, 3:16 · the sea was one of the vastest lakes on Earth. 3:19 · You know Lake Biakal in Russia? 3:21 · A lake so famously large that it makes Loch Ness look like an embarrassing puddle? 3:27 · Well the Aral Sea was over twice the size of that, and only ever so slightly smaller 3:33 · than Africa's Lake Victoria. 3:35 · As a result, it drew thousands upon thousands of peoples to its shorelines, from Tajiks 3:40 · and Uzbeks to Kazakhs, lured in by the promise of freshwater fish to hunt and islands to 3:47 · colonize. 3:48 · Yep, freshwater. 3:49 · Despite its name, the Aral Sea is not a sea in the "undrinkable saltwater" sense, 3:54 · but a regular lake with a salinity of around 10g of salt per liter - compared to 35g per 4:01 · liter for your average ocean. 4:03 · Not exactly something you want coming out your tap, but fresh enough for fish like carp 4:08 · to survive. 4:09 · As for the islands; the Aral Sea is home to 1,000 islands each over 1 hectare in size. 4:15 · The name even comes from the Kyrgyz word Aral-denghiz, meaning "Sea of Islands." 4:20 · For ancient peoples, this fish-stuffed, island-filled sea basically hit the civilization G-Spot. 4:26 · As cultures flourished along its shores, it became a famous stopping point along the Silk 4:31 · Road. 4:32 · But even in the dim and distant past, it was clear just how delicate the Aral Sea was. 4:39 · At some point in the Middle Ages, something happened to one of the two rivers feeding 4:42 · the Sea. 4:43 · We're still not entirely sure what that "something" was; if it was human-driven, 4:46 · or related to some external factor. 4:50 · Either way, the result was an apocalyptic disaster. 4:55 · Shorn of one of its inflows, the Aral Sea began to dry up. 4:58 · As it dried, it shrank, until entire shoreside townships were abandoned dozens of kilometers 5:04 · from its waters. 5:05 · With the drying came economic catastrophe. 5:08 · By 1417, court historian Hafizi-Abru was able to write that the sea no longer existed. 5:14 · Thankfully, this spell of dryness didn't last. 5:16 · At some point in the 16th Century, the Aral Sea began to return. 5:20 · By 1570, documents suggest that it had regained its full size. 5:24 · It was a historical near-miss, a moment when the lake was very nearly wiped out. 5:30 · But it was also a warning to the future. 5:32 · A warning that the delicate ecology of the world's 4th largest lake could easily be 5:37 · destroyed. 5:38 · Unfortunately, the future wasn't in the mood for listening. 5:41 · Here Come the Russians If there's a single person you can blame 5:49 · for the destruction of the Aral Sea, it's Aleksandr Voeikov. 5:53 · Voeikov was born in 1842, right around the time Tsar Nicholas I was beginning the wars 5:55 · that would bring the Aral Sea within the Russian Empire. 5:56 · But Voeikov wasn't a soldier or a politician. 5:57 · He was a climatologist. 5:58 · One who developed a bizarre dislike for the Aral Sea. 6:02 · Because the Aral Sea has no outflow and is instead maintained by evaporation, Voeikov 6:07 · seems to have taken offense to its very existence, calling it a "useless evaporator," and 6:13 · a "mistake of nature." 6:15 · But what could Voeikov do about it? 6:17 · When he died in 1916, the lake remained; an inarguable fact of nature. 6:22 · But Voeikov's writings survived. 6:24 · What's more they influenced a whole generation. 6:28 · A generation who would soon be running the former Russian Empire. 6:33 · Cut ahead to 1948. 6:34 · In the years after Voeikov died, Imperial Russia fell, the areas around the Aral Sea 6:40 · tasted independence, and then were absorbed into the new USSR as the Kazakh and Uzbek 6:46 · Soviet Socialist Republics. 6:49 · Alongside this geopolitical shakeup, Lenin had died, Stalin had come to power, and decades 6:54 · of state-engineered famines, purges, and other assorted horrors had wreaked havoc across 7:00 · the empire. 7:01 · And now Stalin wanted to go even further than bending mere humans to his will. 7:06 · He wanted to mould the landscape itself. 7:09 · The Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature was the first major Soviet attempt to remake 7:14 · the "non-productive" areas of the empire. 7:16 · "Non-productive" in this case meaning virgin forests, centers of rural life, or 7:21 · inland seas supporting fishing villages - stuff you and I might class as "actually really 7:27 · kinda productive". 7:28 · But Uncle Joe preferred a definition of "productive" that involved not ordinary people living ordinary 7:34 · lives, but vast plantations making Moscow rich. 7:38 · And so it was that a network of irrigation channels began to spring up from the rivers 7:43 · feeding the Aral Sea, diverting water for growing cotton. 7:46 · Initially, these new Central Asian farms of "white gold" didn't effect the rivers 7:51 · much. 7:52 · There was just so much water, how could humans possibly exhaust it all? 7:57 · And even if they did, who cared? 8:00 · The people running the Soviet Ministry of Water could all recall Voeikov's words. 8:04 · If the Aral Sea was a "useless evaporator" weren't they justified in putting its water 8:10 · to better use? 8:11 · This toxic attitude prevailed even as Khrushchev took over after Stalin's death and launched 8:17 · his own Virgin Lands Campaign. 8:19 · It prevailed even as irrigation channels criss-crossed Central Asia, diverting so much water that 8:24 · it was a miracle the sea survived. 8:26 · Yet, survive it did. 8:28 · As 1960 dawned, the Aral Sea was in rude health. 8:33 · Stretching 435km north to south, and 290km east to west, it was the center of vital local 8:40 · economies. 8:41 · Fishing villages dominated its shores. 8:43 · There were wetlands, river deltas, hidden bays; thriving and irreplaceable ecosystems. 8:49 · Local towns thrived, too, like Aralsk, or Tastubek - famous for its caviar. 8:54 · Were you to stand on the shorelines back then, you would've watched the fishermen in their 8:59 · boats, watched the children swimming, and thought to yourself that this was a vista 9:04 · that would last forever. 9:06 · Sadly, that wasn't the case. 9:09 · By 1960, the Water Ministry knew the Aral Sea was like a camel with a back so bent its 9:15 · spine was one single straw away from snapping. 9:18 · They could stop digging irrigation ditches right now, and preserve this perfect balance, 9:23 · maintaining a living lake while also growing a decent amount of cotton. 9:27 · But "a decent amount" simply wasn't enough. 9:30 · The leadership wanted more white gold. 9:34 · Eyes wide open, still loyally quoting Voeikov, the Ministry of Water demanded yet more channels 9:40 · be dug, yet more flow diverted. 9:43 · Although they knew what they were doing, they assumed it would take decades for the effects 9:47 · to be felt. 9:48 · Generations, even. 9:50 · They were wrong. 10:41 · The Dying Sea 11:04 · In the summer of 1967, word began to go around the small Kazakh town of Tastubek that something 11:10 · was wrong. 11:11 · As a center of caviar exports, the locals were attuned to the ecosystem they worked 11:15 · in. 11:16 · The Aral Sea had been sustaining life here for centuries. 11:19 · But now something was happening. 11:20 · Almost before their eyes, the residents could see the waters drawing back, away from the 11:25 · shoreline, leaving the town behind. 11:27 · Those locals had no way of knowing it, but their town was like a canary lowered into 11:32 · a coalmine to check for leaking gas. 11:35 · And the agonizing death of their economy would be early warning of the oncoming explosion. 11:40 · Over the next few years, the effects of water diversion began to become clearer and clearer. 11:45 · By 1973, some of the wetlands and deltas had vanished, replaced by sandy desert. 11:50 · By 1980, the rivers feeding the sea were starting to run dry in the summer months, when temperatures 11:55 · soar to 40C. 11:57 · But it was over the next decade that the effects would really take hold. 12:01 · As the 1980s wore on, the shores of the Aral Sea retreated. 12:04 · They moved slowly at first, then quicker and quicker until old fishing villages were stranded 12:10 · two hours' journey from the nearest fish. 12:13 · As the waters receded, the 1,000 islands the Sea was famous for stopped being islands, 12:19 · first becoming peninsulas, and then just outcrops of rock in the midst of desert. 12:24 · One of these former islands was Aralsk-7, a secret bioweapons facility where Soviet 12:29 · scientists engineered weaponized Plague. 12:31 · As you'll know if you've watched our video on it, Aralsk-7 had been selected on the assumption 12:37 · that the Aral Sea's waters would stop its microscopic nightmares from escaping. 12:42 · And now the sea was gone, leaving nothing between plague-carrying rats and hundreds 12:47 · of Kazakh villages. 12:48 · By 1987, the drying was so bad that there was no longer a single Aral Sea. 12:54 · Instead, the waters split in two, creating a smaller North Aral Sea inside Kazakhstan, 12:58 · and a larger South Aral Sea mostly in Uzbekistan. 13:01 · As these two seas shrank, the salinity of the water increased, jumping from 10 grams 13:06 · per liter to 110. 13:08 · In this toxic environment, fish began to die off, leaving entire villages starving. 13:12 · Come 1992, the combined area of the North and South Aral Seas was only 33,800 km2 - barely 13:20 · half the area they'd once covered. 13:22 · The good news was that, come 1992, the Ministry of Water was no longer a thing. 13:27 · And neither was the Soviet Union. 13:28 · The USSR had collapsed in 1991, ending the drive for cotton production in Central Asia. 13:34 · Unfortunately, the successor governments had all realized they were staring down the barrel 13:39 · of economic ruin without the cotton, and so kept on growing it. 13:43 · And so, the Sea slowly died. 13:45 · By 2002, the South Aral Sea had subdivided again, splitting into the East and West Sea. 13:52 · As the 21st Century dawned, towns sustained by the sea for centuries were now abandoned 13:57 · some 90km from the water. 13:59 · Between them and the receding shore lay nothing but empty desert spotted with the decaying 14:04 · hulks of abandoned ships. 14:06 · Faced with ruin, the people living around the Sea abandoned it. 14:10 · Those who could, fled. 14:11 · Those who couldn't sank into poverty, illness, and death. 14:14 · Come 2010, the East Aral Sea was barely a fifth the size it had been in 2002. 14:20 · In 2014, it dried up entirely. 14:23 · In five decades, Soviet mismanagement had done what Voeikov could never have dreamed 14:28 · of. 14:29 · It had killed the "useless evaporator," desiccating the Sea in a way unseen even during 14:35 · the Middle Ages. 14:36 · But it wasn't just the lack of water that caused disaster. 14:38 · There's a reason some refer to the Aral Sea as the Silent Chernobyl. 14:43 · Like Chernobyl, it was a disaster made of Soviet incompetence. 14:46 · Like Chernobyl, it left behind a ghost town - or towns, in this case. 14:50 · And, like Chernobyl, it was a disaster that could kill you. 15:00 · The Wasteland In 2015, National Geographic published a series 15:03 · of interviews with locals living around the ruins of the former Aral Sea. 15:07 · One of them, Yusup Kamalov from the lakeside region of Karakalpakstan, summed up the devastation 15:13 · as follows: "This is what the end of the world looks 15:15 · like," he said, "If we ever have Armageddon, the people of Karakalpakstan are the only 15:20 · ones who will survive, because we are already living it." 15:24 · The Armageddon he was referring to was more than just visual. 15:28 · Although photos of the dried seabed littered with dead ships may look strangely beautiful, 15:32 · the reality of living there is anything but. 15:35 · As the sea dried, it left behind ground that was saturated in salt. 15:39 · While the Soviet water scientists had predicted it would bake into a hard crust, it instead 15:43 · remained loose, at the whims of the lightest breeze. 15:47 · The result is salt storms that can blow up out of nowhere, stinging your eyes and making 15:51 · you feel deathly ill. 15:53 · But the painful concentrations of salt are just the tip of the iceberg. 15:57 · The dust storms also blow deadly quantities of DDT, phosalone, and other pesticides. 16:03 · All are known to cause cancer after prolonged exposure, plus all manner of other nasty illnesses. 16:09 · In the years of the dead Aral Sea, cancer rates around Karakalpakstan have shot to 25 16:15 · times the world average. 16:17 · Those who escape cancer are felled by respiratory diseases, immune system disorders, and antibiotic-resistant 16:24 · tuberculosis. 16:25 · In short, the air around the Aral Sea is toxic to breathe. 16:28 · And even those who escape these deadly dust storms suffer. 16:32 · So many chemicals have been dumped into the area, sunk to the bottom of the waters long 16:36 · ago, that every part of the food chain has become contaminated. 16:40 · If you want a single, depressing statistic to sum up the danger of living in this remote 16:45 · corner of the world, you should know that infant mortality rates here are some of the 16:49 · highest on Earth - growing steadily since the ‘70s even as they drop in the rest of 16:54 · Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. 16:56 · All in all, it's a disaster area. 16:59 · A place inimical to human life. 17:02 · And it gets worse. 17:03 · When the Sea vanished, the effect on the local climate was beyond comprehension. 17:08 · From somewhere that experienced relatively mild weather, the Aral Depression has become 17:12 · somewhere that the weather Gods seem to have taken a personal dislike to. 17:17 · Nowadays, temperatures swinging wildly between -40C and plus 40C are not uncommon, blasting 17:23 · and burning this once-fertile land into a lifeless desert. 17:27 · It this hostile world, one of the few things that seems capable of surviving is the Bubonic 17:32 · Plague, which occasionally causes minor outbreaks. 17:35 · While we're not definitely tying the ongoing existence of the Black Death in the Aral Sea 17:39 · region to the abandoned Soviet bioweapons lab working on the plague right nearby, we 17:45 · are saying it's a spooky coincidence. 17:48 · And that, really, is the Aral Sea today. 17:50 · A forgotten, toxic world festering in Central Asia, where all that remains of a once-great 17:56 · lake are devastated towns and sick and penniless people. 18:00 · According to scientists, the chances of the Uzbek East Sea ever replenishing in our lifetimes 18:05 · are vanishingly remote. 18:07 · The Aral Sea, it seems, is dead. 18:10 · At least, in Uzbekistan it is. 18:13 · Earlier, we mentioned that when the Aral Sea first divided, the North Sea wound up in Kazakhstan, 18:17 · and the south in Uzbekistan. 18:19 · While the unfolding disaster has continued unabated in Uzbekistan, the same cannot be 18:24 · said for its northern neighbor. 18:25 · Unlikely as it seems, our video today isn't just a story of environmental degradation 18:30 · and despair, although there has been plenty of that. 18:33 · It's also a story of hope. 18:36 · Time for us to venture upwards at last to the North Aral Sea, where the decades of destruction 18:41 · haven't just been stopped. 18:43 · They've been actively reversed. 18:46 · Hope Springs Eternal If you'd surveyed the North Aral Sea in 18:53 · 1994, chances are you'd have predicted a complete collapse in the next few years. 18:58 · At that point, the North Aral Sea was drying even faster than the South Aral Sea. 19:02 · And a meeting that year between Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and 19:08 · Kyrgyzstan on preserving the two rivers feeding it had amounted to nothing. 19:12 · But while things would get worse over the next decade, they would also soon start to 19:16 · get better. 19:17 · In the early 2000s, Kazakhstan presented the World Bank with a plan for combating the North 19:22 · Aral Sea's decline. 19:24 · With the Sea's catastrophic death headline news at the time, the World Bank handed over 19:28 · $87m, likely expecting it would help slow the decline and nothing more. 19:33 · But, to everyone's surprise, the Kazakhs instead managed to save their sea. 19:37 · The first step was to completely sever the North Aral Sea from the South. 19:41 · Until the mid-2000s, a narrow channel ran between the two, filtering water down from 19:46 · Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan. 19:48 · The Kazakh government decided that, rather than let both seas die, they'd sacrifice 19:52 · one to save the other. 19:54 · A vast dyke known as the Kokaral dam was built across the channel, trapping the North Sea's 19:59 · waters in Kazakhstan. 20:00 · At the same time, a massive cleanup operation was launched along the Syr Darya River - the 20:05 · same river Alexander the Great had stood beside, many centuries before. 20:09 · When the work was completed in 2005, scientists thought it might take ten years to replenish 20:13 · the North Aral Sea. 20:15 · To everyone's shock, the water level rose 3.3m in seven months. 20:20 · As the North Aral Sea slowly refilled, its salinity levels began to drop. 20:24 · Shores that had been salt-swept desert sank once more beneath the waves. 20:28 · The waters got closer and closer again to the old fishing villages. 20:32 · As the 2010s got underway, the Kazakh government decided to try reintroducing fish that had 20:37 · died when the salinity levels went through the roof. 20:40 · Not only did the fish survive. 20:42 · They thrived. 20:43 · Around the same time that the East Aral Sea was vanishing from existence, the North Aral 20:47 · Sea reopened to fishermen. 20:49 · Villagers who'd last caught fish in the 1980s returned to the water for the first 20:53 · time in decades. 20:54 · Sons of those fishermen who'd only ever known a life of grinding poverty had their 20:59 · first experiences in a boat. 21:01 · From a dead industry, fishing in the North Aral Sea once again became a viable way to 21:05 · make a living. 21:06 · You can see the effects most clearly in the town of Aralsk. 21:09 · A one-time port city, Aralsk slumped into decline in the 1980s as the disaster took 21:14 · hold. 21:15 · In the depths of the crisis, this fishing town found itself stuck 150km from sea so 21:20 · salty no fish could live in it. 21:22 · By 2018 - the closest date we could get accurate figures for - the waters had returned to just 21:27 · 17km from the edge of town. 21:30 · With the water came bream, pike-perch, and flounder. 21:33 · From abandoning all hope, the older generation now truly believes they will live to see the 21:38 · day the waters return to Aralsk's docks. 21:41 · But for that to happen, a few more miracles still have to take place. 21:45 · While the North Aral Sea is today thriving, it has also grown back as far as it currently 21:50 · can. 21:51 · The Kokaral dam is too small to hold any more water back, with the result that billions 21:55 · of cubic meters are now lost every year. 21:58 · It's estimated that merely adding another 4 meters' height to the dyke would retain 22:02 · enough water to allow the North Aral Sea to regrow by another 400 km2. 22:08 · Enough to perhaps at last turn Aralsk back into a thriving port. 22:12 · At time of writing, there was no deadline for this expansion. 22:16 · The Kazakh government was giving nothing more than vague words of commitment to the project. 22:21 · But hopefully it will happen soon. 22:23 · Hopefully the elderly fishermen in Aralsk will be able to see their Sea once more, lapping 22:28 · at the docks, as alive as they remember it once being. 22:32 · If that happened… well. 22:33 · It might just qualify as a miracle. 22:35 · The story of the Aral Sea, then, is actually two separate stories: one about the Toxic 22:39 · Soviet Sea turning into desert; and one about the Reborn Sea to its north. 22:45 · But more than that, it's a tale about choices. 22:48 · About how we can look at habitat destruction and environmental degradation, and choose 22:52 · to either turn a blind eye and accept the worst; or to dig our heels in, grit our teeth, 22:59 · and do something about it - no matter what the cost. 23:03 · The recovery of the North Aral Sea hasn't been easy, and it's still a long way from 23:07 · where it once was. 23:09 · But hope has returned, bringing with it a glimpse of a better future. 23:13 · And if we can save a sea as contaminated and degraded as the Aral Sea… 23:18 · Then maybe, just maybe, there's hope for the rest of our world too.
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I thought it said Anal.