Soviet planners cut irrigation canals into the two rivers feeding the Aral Sea in the 1960s to grow cotton in the desert. The world’s fourth largest lake lost about 90 percent of its water, and its fishing fleet now sits on dry salt
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Soviet hydrologists ran the numbers before the first canal was cut, and they said the sea would die.
They signed off anyway. Cotton earned foreign currency, and a large salty lake sitting in the middle of a desert earned nothing that showed up in a five-year plan. So the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, two rivers fed by snowmelt from mountains hundreds of kilometres away, were tapped and bled out across the sand. NASA’s Earth Observatory frames the trade in a single line: transforming the des
They signed off anyway. Cotton earned foreign currency, and a large salty lake sitting in the middle of a desert earned nothing that showed up in a five-year plan. So the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, two rivers fed by snowmelt from mountains hundreds of kilometres away, were tapped and bled out across the sand. NASA’s Earth Observatory frames the trade in a single line: transforming the des
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