World Bank restores Aral Sea

ALMATY, Kazakhstan — The first phase of a project to rehabilitate the northern part of Central Asia’s desiccated Aral Sea has been completed far ahead of schedule, with more than 300 square miles of formerly dry seabed already covered by water.

The drying up of three-quarters of the Aral Sea, once one of the world’s largest lakes, is considered one of the biggest man-made ecological disasters.

The $85 million rehabilitation project, funded by the World Bank, consisted of improving irrigation and other water works along the Syr Darya River, which flows into what is now known as the Northern Sea, and building an eight-mile dike to raise the level of that part of the sea by 10 feet and reduce its salinity. Due to excessive draining, the Aral Sea split into three parts — two in the south and one in the north.

“We’re almost there,” said Masood Ahmad, the World Bank official in charge of the project. “We expect we’ll have achieved our goal this April.”

“In the satellite imagery, you can clearly see the Northern Sea has risen significantly since last August,” said Philip Micklin, an Aral Sea specialist at Western Michigan University.

When the project was approved in 1999, it was expected that it would take five to 10 years to fill the Northern Sea, but the irrigation rehabilitation work cut waste and increased the river’s flow into the sea by a greater margin than expected, he said.

Second phase

A second phase, to be carried out by the government of Kazakhstan, is expected to raise the sea by another 13 feet by the end of the decade.

The brackish Aral Sea, shared by Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south, was once the world’s third-largest inland body of water, but the Soviet government chose to sacrifice its rich fishery to attain self-sufficiency in cotton, diverting the waters from the Syr and Amu Darya rivers that had sustained the sea to irrigate cotton fields.

In fewer than 50 years, it lost 75 percent of its surface, baring a seabed poisoned with toxic herbicides and fertilizers that sent respiratory disease rates in the region soaring.

By the time Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan became independent, days before the Soviet Union was dissolved on Dec. 26, 1991, the two main ports, Moynak and Aralsk, were more than 50 miles away from the water. The most southern part is so salty that only brine shrimp survive in it.

In Aralsk, a hospital physician, Dr. Marat Turemulatov, said cheap, abundant and fresh fish from the sea have already appeared in local markets.

“Before, we only had small amounts of fish from the lakes,” he said. “The sea had become too salty for most species. But now, we’re seeing fish from the sea in the markets.”

Health will improve

“We have an epidemic of tuberculosis and we have chronic anemia, and poor nutrition is a major component in both,” Dr. Turemulatov said in a telephone interview from Almaty, Kazakhstan’s economic capital. “With people eating more fresh fish, their health is going to improve,” he said.

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