In 1713, the envoy of the Mangyshlak Turkmens, Khoja Nefes, reached the "White Tsar" in St. Petersburg and presented him with a tempting offer: in a distant country, about which Russia knows nothing, the mighty Amu Darya River flows through the desert. It used to flow into the Caspian Sea, and now it flows into the Aral Sea. If the river is turned back to the Caspian, the Russians will be able to travel by water from the Volga (through the Caspian up the Amu Darya) to the sources of the Indus.
The offer was indeed very tempting. Peter the Great was interested in the waterway to India, besides, the stories about gold mines, allegedly located somewhere near the Amu Darya, were very tempting. A large expedition to Khiva was organized under the leadership of the Caucasian prince A. Bekovich-Cherkassky, whom the Muslims called Davlet-Girey - the lucky one.
In April 1715, the expedition left Astrakhan on specially built ships, surveyed the eastern coast of the Caspian and made the first professional map of its coast, including the "Black mouth" - Kara-Bugaz-Gol.
The expedition also found the Caspian mouth of the Uzboy River, which connected the Aral Sea region with the Caspian Sea. Since then, this romantic story has been teasing geographers and lovers of antiquity for almost three hundred years. And then, already in August 1715, Davlet-Girey reported to the tsar: “I reached the place, with the title of Acts, where the Amu Darya flowed for centuries into the Caspian Sea. Nowadays there is no water in that place, not in nearby places, for some reason, this river is dammed up by a dam from Khiva in four days' journey. From that dam this river is forced to flow into the lake, which is called the Aral Sea”.
Peter I showed the map compiled by A. Bekovich-Cherkassky to the largest European geographer DeLille and, having convinced the entire scientific world that the Oaks (contrary to Ptolemy) flows not into the Caspian Sea, but into the Aral Sea, completely unknown until then, received the honorary title of Academician of the Paris Academy sciences. The fact that this was the first information about the Aral Sea is indicated by the comment of the 18th century geographer Karl Baer: “It may seem fabulous, but nevertheless it is certain that before Peter the scientific world did not know the Aral Sea at all”.
However, the venture with the waterway from the Volga to India failed, and the Aral Sea was out of the sphere of Russian interests for more than a hundred years. Only in the middle of the 19th century, attention to him was revived thanks to the expedition of A. I. Butakov. The commander of the schooner "Raduga", he went to sea from adolescence, visited the "round the world", was known as a smart and experienced sailor. However, with the higher ranks of the Admiralty, he was in bad standing. Still would! The lieutenant, you see, dared to accuse of embezzlement, Captain Juncker - one of the favorites of His Serene Highness Prince Menshikov, the head of the naval department.
Above Lieutenant A. I. Opal gravitated towards Butakov. And the only consolation for him were voyages, books and conversations with the old admiral. Alexei was easily received at the house of the famous sailor, and old Bellingshausen locked himself in the office with the lieutenant for a long time. Most often, they talked about some distant sea, maps of which did not exist. Information about him seeped out of the darkness of centuries and therefore was confused and confused. So, for example, in one old book it was reported: "And in the Blue Sea the water is salty."
However, millions of years ago, the waters of the ancient Tethys Ocean splashed across the vast territory now occupied by the Aral and the Caspian Sea and the territory between them. Millennia passed, powerful tectonic faults changed the face of our planet, and as a result of one of these cataclysms, the Tethys Ocean disappeared. In its place, two salt lakes appeared - the Aral and the Caspian. These lakes are so huge that the names of the seas have long been firmly established behind them. The sea-lake Aral is twice the size of the Sea of Azov, and Belgium and Holland combined could fit on the territory of the Aral. The Aral Sea is the fourth largest in the world - after the Caspian Sea, Lake Superior in North America and Lake Victoria in Africa.
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So the disgraced lieutenant A. I. Butakov dreamed of an expedition to the "Blue Sea-Lake", and the old admiral was busy about it in the echoing corridors of the Admiralty.
In addition to the disgraced lieutenant, the disgraced poet T. G. Shevchenko, who made many drawings and watercolors during the campaign. He drew enthusiastically, tirelessly, because on the Aral Sea, (as he later admitted himself), he saw "a lot of original, never seen before."
Several years later A. I. Butakov brought the first scientific information about the Aral. And as soon as people learned about the Aral Sea, their hands were "combed" to remake it. In 1871, a small booklet was published in Kiev, which did not attract any serious attention. Its author, Ya. Demchenko, was one of the first who proposed to remake the nature of these places. And he proposed neither more nor less "to dig multi-hundred-kilometer canals through which it was necessary to send the waters of Siberian rivers to Central Asia." And he outlined this whole plan in his book, which was called "On the flooding of the Aral-Caspian lowland to improve the climate of the adjacent countries."
Since then, active human interventions in the life of the Aral Sea region began. There were many people who enthusiastically supported the project of Y. Demchenko. There were, on the contrary, those who wanted to reduce (or even destroy!) The sea, turning the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers away from it.
Every year, a meter layer of water evaporates from the turquoise surface of the Aral Sea. Therefore, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya are in a hurry, in a hurry, trying to compensate for the losses of the sea. This went on for over three thousand years. But man intervened in the affairs of nature, and the sea began to retreat quickly. After all, a person always intervenes in one direction - for his own benefit. He never replenishes the fresh waters of the rivers that affect these sea-lakes. He only takes river waters on their way to the seas, preventing them even from reaching their mouths.
The water balance was maintained at the end of the 1950s: 64 cubic kilometers of water entered the Aral every year, and 63 cubic kilometers evaporated. But since 1965, due to the reduction in river flow, the sea level began to fall rapidly. And water from the Syr Darya and Amu Darya was taken for the Fergana, Golodnostep and other canals and waterworks built before the 1960s. And of course, for cotton.
Every piece of land is sown with cotton in Central Asia, cotton bushes turn green at the very thresholds of peasant houses, he looks them directly into the windows. Hundreds of kilograms of mineral fertilizers, tens of kilograms of pesticides are applied per hectare of land. Two rates of water are poured out to only get 23 centners of cotton from one hectare. By world standards, this is, I must say, a very low figure.
For a long time, they didn't really know how much cotton the country needed. Nine million tons or five? Maybe nine. But then why did two million tons go for technical needs, turning into third-rate products? There was no limit to wastefulness, the economy seemed to go mad. Disturbing conversations arose long ago, but they intensified especially in the late 1970s. Gloomy messages came from everywhere. The bottom of the Aral Sea is bare … The shores of the seaports have gone tens of kilometers … The climate is changing, animals are dying out: there were 178 species, 38 are left … Tugai - reed thickets are dying … People's life is deteriorating, because it is not the earth, but water that creates it in the desert.
However, uncontrolled water intake, lack of water meters, overestimated irrigation rates (which have not been scientifically corrected for years) have led to an unjustifiably large waste of water. As a result, water does not ennoble the earth, but ruins it. For example, in the Fergana Valley, hundreds of thousands of hectares of fields stood with a water layer of several meters.
For twenty years, the Aral Sea has lost 640 cubic kilometers of water. The sea lost two-thirds of its volume and two-thirds of its area, but it was just gigantic - blue without end and edge. Ships went from Mainak to Aralsk. Now the sea level has dropped thirteen meters. The exposed bottom of the Aral Sea (which is 2.6 million hectares) turned into a man-made desert, which has already received its name - Aralkum. Billions of tons of toxic salts have been accumulated here. From the deserted bottom of the sea, millions of tons of salty-toxic dust rise into the air, which the wind carries over long distances. With the drying up of the sea, dust storms became more frequent. Dust clouds are carried on the glaciers of the Pamir, Altai, Tien Shan, and this, in turn, changes the regime of the rivers originating there.
In the fields of Central Asia, the chemical DDT was used against wilt (cotton disease) for many years. Its compound is very dangerous for humans, and in nature it practically does not decompose. DDT and other pesticides have been washed off the fields for many years and accumulated in the sea. Now poisonous clouds are floating here.
In recent years, hundreds of natural lakes in the Aral Sea region have dried up, which provided food for livestock, fish, and poultry that fed people. Now fish for two canneries (in Aralsk and Muynak) is imported from the Far East and the Baltic states. However, due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, it may not be imported from the Baltic states. But even twenty years ago, fishermen came to the passing trains and sold fat bream and huge barbel to passengers. The peasants brought melons, watermelons, tomatoes, cucumbers.
Timber for the Kyzyl-Orda Pulp Mill is delivered (if still delivered) from Siberia, since the reed delta has dried up. Previously, the entire territory of Karakalpakstan, Khorezm and Tashauz regions experienced the beneficial effects of the Aral Sea, but now the air here has become drier. The frost-free period was reduced by twenty days.
Previously, in the Aral Sea region, not only new ones were built and old towns and villages were expanded. There was even talk of opening an international resort, because there was everything for that: a dry climate, and from April to November it was a swimming season.
Now around the Aral Sea is empty and deserted. The fishing village of Uchsai used to be home to ten thousand people; by the end of the 1980s, only about a thousand remained. And now, is there a village itself?
In the once prosperous Aralsk, today there are thousands of unemployed. And the city itself? Ragged, salt-eaten buildings, dirty streets, stunted, drying out greenery … Next to the dead sea is the former city port, where fishing boats rust. On the territory of Aralsk, 29 fetid lakes arose. In them, the population dumps household waste, from which livestock drinks water. There is one bucket of drinking water per person per day in the city.
In the late 1980s, the correspondents of the Novy Mir and Pamir magazines organized the Aral-88 expedition. The participants spent two weeks on the Aral Sea and in the Aral Sea region, the expedition covered thirteen thousand kilometers in the Aral Sea basin, the Syrdarya and Amu Darya rivers. And everywhere they saw dilapidated cities surrounded by desert - Aralsk, Muynak, Kazalinsk, the village of Uchsai, catastrophically thinning fishing and shepherd settlements.
The bottom of the Aral Sea appeared before the expedition members white-red, swollen with salt. From its ports (now also former) it went sixty to seventy kilometers. Dozens of rusting, crumbling fishing trawlers, boats, schooners, motor boats, longboats remained in the former ports, now covered with sand.
To discuss the results of the "Aral-88" expedition, a "Round Table" was held, in which Academician A. A. Dorodnitsyn, Secretary of the Board of the USSR Writers' Union Yu. D. Chernichenko, senior researcher at the Institute of Geography of the USSR Academy of Sciences D. B. Oreshkin, writer Ch. T. Aitmatov, assistant to the prosecutor of the RSFSR V. I. Oleinik and many others. At one of the roundtable sessions, the editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, writer S. P. Zalygin. He said: “Very often one hears that we are amateurs, do not understand the matter, we are poking around in our own problems. Then why did not a single ministry, not a single department organize the same group of specialists, the same expedition as ours? Because the departments do not want to know anything except their own interests. And it is interested that only their specialists - and no one else! - went on such trips."
Indeed, high-ranking government and party leaders knew about the difficult situation with the Aral Sea, scientists and specialists knew … They knew and deliberately concealed from the people information about the impending catastrophe. In May 1988, the former island of Kokaral merged with the land from the south (from the north, it merged back in 1977), and the Aral split into the Big and Small seas. The shallow, rapidly drying up Small Sea belongs to Kazakhstan, the Big Sea turned out to be in Uzbekistan. Even then, projects began to be created, according to which each republic would build its own dams and fill “its Aral” with water.
Now, for Russia, the "problem of the Aral Sea" has turned into a problem, albeit for the near, but "abroad". The authorities of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, on whose territory the disastrous regions and the sea itself (or rather what is left of it, are located), have many other problems, in their opinion, more important, and there is neither time nor funds for the Aral. The level of the Aral Sea (not replenished by anything) falls at a rate of 0.5 meters per year, that is, in five to six years the Aral Sea may disappear completely, turning into a series of small and dangerously polluted water bodies.
From the book: "HUNDRED GREAT DISASTERS". N. A. Ionina, M. N. Kubeev