The Aral Sea: The Toxic Soviet Sea

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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