Aral Sea
About Aral Sea
The Aral Sea was an endorheic salt lake lying between Kazakhstan to its north and Uzbekistan to its south, which began shrinking in the 1960s and had largely dried up into desert by 2007. It was in the Aktobe and Kyzylorda regions of Kazakhstan and the Karakalpakstan autonomous region of Uzbekistan. The name roughly translates from Mongolic and Turkic languages to "Sea of Islands", a reference to the large number of islands that once dotted its waters. The Aral Sea drainage basin encompasses Uzbekistan and parts of Afghanistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.
On the show — 15 mentions total
There's an island in the Aral Sea which in Russia is known as Vosrezhdenia, which means rebirth. It was a place where they had a biological weapons research facility and where a big cloud of smallpox was released in 1971.
from 516: No Such Thing As Zeno's Harbour, 2024-02-01 at 00:34:41 · read transcript
Other times Aral Sea came up
Then during the Soviet times, because both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan were part of the Soviet Union, and the Aral Sea kind of straddled both, that was all centralised, and also there was a mega drive to farm cotton in Uzbekistan, and cotton is a very, very thirsty crop, and they diverted the rivers so much that this entire sea just.
No Such Thing As Zeno's Harbour, 2024-02-01 · listen
All the Maccams are gone. oh, there are people from Sunderland are going, yeah, well, we've had that in our head for a long time. We wish. Just one more thing about the Aral Sea, which I thought was very interesting, because I looked in some newspaper archives, sort of what people had said about it before it got all depressing. Whenever it's mentioned in the 18th and 19th centuries, in early 20th century, it is mentioned as a sea which keeps on disappearing.
516: No Such Thing As Zeno's Harbour, 2024-02-01 · listen
I didn't realise. Brackish saltwater briny. Only nematodes and microbes can survive. Also awfully, it's split in two, the Aral Sea, so the North Aral and the South Aral. The North Aral levels actually stabilised, the water levels stabilised, about 1988. By then it got quite salty and saltwater species has started to thrive in it. Then it started sort of getting a bit fresher again, replenishing a little bit, so all the saltwater species died out.
516: No Such Thing As Zeno's Harbour, 2024-02-01 · listen
More places from this episode
516: No Such Thing As Zeno's Harbour put 2 places on the map.
- Colorado River · Mexico
Coordinates: 45.0000, 60.0000