Reclaiming the Aral Sea
A.
2. Avoidance of serious problems at present is no guarantee for the future
3. Beware of quick fixes for complex environmental and human problems
4. The natural environment is amazingly resilient, so do not abandon hope or efforts to save it
- The Aral Sea gets almost all its water from the Amu and Syr rivers
- The Soviet Union hid the sea’s demise for decades until 1985, when leader Mikhail Gorbachev revealed the great environmental and human tragedy
- Shipping on the Aral also ceased because the water receded many kilometers from the major ports of Aralsk to the north and Moynak in the south; keeping increasingly long channels open to the cities became too costly
- Health experts say the local population suffers from high levels of respiratory illnesses, throat and esophageal cancer, and digestive disorders caused by breathing and ingesting salt-laden air and water
- When it was far out to sea, the Soviet Union used Vozrozhdeniya as a testing ground for biological weapons; anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, plague, typhus, smallpox, and bot- ulinum toxin were tried on horses, monkeys, sheep, donkeys and laboratory animals
- In the early 1990s it constructed an earthen dike to block outflow to the south that was uselessly lost to evaporation, but a catastrophic failure in April 1999 destroyed it
- The western basin’s fate depends on groundwater inflow, estimates for which are uncertain
- Large-scale engineering could partially rehabilitate the western basin
- The Soviet Union began such work in the late 1980s, and Uzbekistan has continued this effort with the help of international donors
- Some lessons humans learned:
2. Avoidance of serious problems at present is no guarantee for the future
3. Beware of quick fixes for complex environmental and human problems
4. The natural environment is amazingly resilient, so do not abandon hope or efforts to save it
B. Back in 1960, the Aral Sea within Central Asia used to be the forth largest lake on the planet. However, by 2007, the Aral Sea had shrunken to just 10 percent of what it originally was. It was found out that the lake had flowed into three residual lakes after the rivers that fed it cut the freshwater flow. Fish disappeared which caused the shore towns to collapse, seabeds dried up which are now dried up and covered with salt and toxins. The Soviets Union had hid the sea's demise for decades until 1985 when the leader, Mikhail Gorbachev revealed the great environmental and human tragedy. Despite this, a dam was built with in 2005 that was able to revive the northern part of the lake. The southern part of the lake had already been completely dead but could be revived with the revival of the Amu River that feeds it. There are several lessons that humans have learned from this experience that are very beneficial to the study of how to prevent a problem like this from happening and we are working hard to make sure our environment is okay.
|
C. After reading the article, it was very sad reading about all of the events that had happened. There are many solution to this problem now that we have learned from this specific problem. I believe that the moral of this story is that us as a human race has to learned from the past mistakes of past generations and learn from them so that our future can be brighter. We must take in consideration all of the wrong the past generation has done and do our best to make our future better. We have to help fix our ocean because it is a very crucial part of our lives and it contributes heavily to our health and we rely on the ocean because of these reasons. Because of this, we need to start preventing water pollution and reengineer the bodies of water.
|