The Aral sea is a drainless salt lake in Central Asia, on the border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Since the 1960s, the sea level (and the volume of water in it) has been rapidly decreasing due to the intake of water from the main feeding rivers Amu Darya and Syr Darya.
Before the shallowing, the Aral sea was the fourth largest lake in the world. Almost all water inflow to the Aral sea is provided by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers.
For thousands of years, it happened that the Amu Darya riverbed went away from the Aral sea (to the Caspian sea), causing a decrease in the size of the Aral sea. However, with the return of the river, the Aral was always restored to its former borders.
Today, intensive irrigation of cotton and rice fields takes a significant part of the flow of these two rivers, which sharply reduces the flow of water to their deltas and, consequently, to the sea itself.
Precipitation in the form of rain and snow, as well as underground sources give the Aral sea much less water than it is lost during evaporation, as a result of which the water volume of the lake-sea decreases, and the salinity level increases.
In the Soviet Union, the deteriorating state of the Aral sea was hidden for decades, until 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev made this environmental disaster public. In the late 1980s, the water level fell so much that the entire sea was divided into two parts: the Northern Small Aral and the southern Big Aral.
By 2007, the deep Western and shallow Eastern reservoirs were clearly defined in the southern part, as well as the remains of a small separate Bay.
The volume of the Great Aral has decreased from 708 to only 75 km3, and the salinity of the water has increased from 14 to more than 100 g / l, which is quite enough to explain why the sea has become salty.
With the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the Aral sea was divided between the newly formed States: Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Thus, an end was put to the grandiose Soviet plan to transfer the waters of distant Siberian rivers here, and competition for the possession of melting water resources developed.
It remains only to be glad that it was not possible to finish the project on the transfer of the rivers of Siberia, because it is unknown what disasters would have followed this.