Ubiquitously Uzbekistan – The Muynak Ship Cemetery

At the roadside restaurant, where most tourists stopped for their meals in a vast stretch of no man’s land, we had a much-needed Lachman in hot soup. I also had the opportunity to put on whatever pieces of clothing that I had with me to keep warm. Our next stop was the Muynak Ship Cemetery.

It was extremely windy at Muynak. We warmed up again inside the Muynak Museum. Despite its small and humble collection of exhibits, I thought it well served the purpose of introducing the story of the Aral Sea.

The Aral Sea, the Lifeline of the Karakalpakstan People

Before the 1960s, the Aral sea was thriving with life. It was the fourth largest body of salt water situated inlands. The main products of the Aral Sea were fish and fur. There was video footage at the museum showing the fish canning industry, with images of the abundance that once blessed this now-deserted community. The fish canning factory must have employed thousands of people. The footages conveyed a sense of upbeat optimism—there was food and there was work.

Besides the fishes, the wildlife that once roamed the nature here included wild ducks, herons, swans, geese, pheasants, flamingoes, pelicans, swamp lynxes, eagles, sparrow hawks, wildcats etc.

But in the early 1950s, the Soviet Union embarked on a program to increase river diversions to expand irrigated cotton production in this region, including parts of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Starting in 1954 with the construction of the Karakum Canal in Turkmenistan, large amounts of water were diverted from the former fresh water sources of the Aral Sea to irrigate fields. Gradually, the origin of the water for the Aral Sea, the rivers of Amu Darya (also known by the older name of the Oxus) and Syr Darya, were cut off. Half of the flows of these two rivers used to replenish the water at the Aral Sea.

This decision of the Soviet Union had the immediate result of the sea level declining by 15 meters or so, and the surface area reduced by half. In the late 1970s, no water from the Syr Darya reached the Aral Sea, and the Amu Darya supplied only a minimal and dwindling volume.

Until the early 1990s, fish had been shipped in from distant locations (the Arctic, the Baltic and the Pacific) for processing. The loss of fish productivity sparked a collapse of the industry and employment. In the 1960s, 43,430 metric tons of fish were caught in the Sea, dropping to 17,400 tons in 1970, to zero tons in 1980, and still now. This was devastating to the Karakalpakstan people, not least the fact that the environmental damage has caused an enormity on their health.

Uzbekistan is still the largest exporter of cotton today.

An Environmental Disaster of Desertification at the Aral Sea

There was phenomenal decline in the water level and surface area at the Aral Sea, so much that the shrinkage was observable in space. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, there was widespread awareness of the potential degradation surrounding the Aral Sea draw-down. Eventually, the water surface area shrunk to 1/10 of its original size. The Aral basin was singled out by the International Geographical Union (IGU) in the early 1990s as one of the Earth’s critical zones. Fishing stopped altogether in the 1970s to 1980s. Then the following decades came with significant desertification.

Perhaps it takes a brief explanation for how the dry-up of the Aral Sea has caused far-reaching damage to the whole habitat and the ecosystem. First of all, monocropping of any plant erodes soil, and cotton farming itself requires a significant amount of water. This resulted in the complete diversion of the two main rivers. As fields were continually irrigated on a large scale, soil fertility rapidly declined, and this prompted attempts to use increasing amounts of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides to maintain, if not expand, cotton productivity. Many of these chemicals found their way through the return flow to the rivers, as well as to the ground water.

The cut-off of fresh water flows into the Aral Sea led to increasing salinization of both the water and the soil. To address the increasing salinization of soils, more water had to be used to flush the land of salts and other compounds. Much of this drainage water was returned to the rivers and eventually to the Aral Sea. Drainage canals were eventually constructed to divert some of the contaminated water away from the Sea into Lake Sarakamysh, a regional desert depression.

The salinity of the Aral Sea water increased to such an extent that several areas had the same salinity as an open ocean. The decreased sea levels resulted in dust storms that had both environmental and health consequences.

The sorrowful sights at the ship cemetery confirmed this process. Some ships had their steel cast bodies stripped and left with just the rusty skeletons. The gloomy day seemed to match this despondence. The abandoned fishing boats lying on a vast swathe of desert stand as the woeful testament to a once-thriving fishing industry that supported the people that took this area as their native land.

The Health and Economic Effects of Desertification at the Aral Sea

The people of Karakalpakstan suffered from severe health consequences of the Aral Sea depletion. High infant mortality rate, birth defects, widespread kidney stone issues, and throat cancer began to appear after the Aral Sea depletion. There were efforts to advocate for the Karakalpakstan people to move elsewhere en masse, but many have refused to leave their native land, despite the wholesale destruction of both their natural habitat and their means of livelihood. Of course, some have also left, and they ended up taking low-paying jobs at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. This environmental disaster has destroyed both the habitat and threatened the survival of a whole people.

There is current effort to recreate the Aral Sea, and the water surface has indeed increased. Some wild life has also returned. While these efforts to restore the Aral Sea were met with moderate success and it takes a very long time to show results, hope goes a long way.

Sources

Descriptions on site at the Muynak Ship Cemetery

Iwao Kobori and Michael H. Glantz, Eds., Central Eurasian Water Crisis: Caspian, Aral and Dead Seas (1998).

Jacob Dreyer, A Giant Inland Sea Is Now a Desert, and a Warning for Humanity, New York Times, November 28, 2023, Guest Essay.