Aral Sea

[The Chronicler]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100404/ap_on_...un_central_asia

After reading this article, I was inspired to create this discussion topic.

The Aral Sea, located in Central Asia in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was once the fourth largest lake in the world. The lake began to shrink in the 1960s due to a Soviet project that diverted the rivers that fed it for irrigation. Today, it has shrunk to nearly 10% of its former area. Although Kazakhstan has made efforts to save part of the lake by building a dam, the rest of the lake seem like it will be gone in only a few years.

Edit: I found an animated map on Wikipedia that shows how the lake has shrunk over the last few decades:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...9f/Aral_Sea.gif
(I chose to use a link because I thought the image was too big)

[Noname]

I've heard of this. I've also heard that there has been an effort to restore the lake to at least a semblance of its former size. Heard anything about that?

I know of the infamous images of stranded ships and an island which used to be in the Aral Sea with Soviet-era anthrax containers, in which some of the spores were still alive despite being bleached twice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vozrozhdeniya_Island