Another Communist Tragedy: One of the World’s Worst Ecological Disasters

[Psalm 51:17]

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/2229228-another-communist-tragedy-one-of-the-worlds-worst-ecological-disasters/?expvar=004&utm_expid=21082672-24.gOOCytYgRwCaxZzLkdQRUw.1
Another Communist Tragedy: One of the World’s Worst Ecological Disasters
3/3/17

The Aral Sea, once the fourth largest lake in the world, has almost completely dried up—but it’s mostly a man-made phenomenon, described as “one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters.”

Originally, the lake covered 26,300 sq miles between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. However, it’s been steadily shrinking since the 1960s after Soviet irrigation projects diverted rivers that fed into it, splitting it into four, much smaller lakes.

Now, only 10 percent of the original lake still exists, according to Scientific American.

Recent NASA satellite images revealed its untold destruction, showing that the entire eastern portion had completely dried up. The eastern portion is now officially called the Aralkum Desert. According to the U.S. space agency:

    By 2001, the southern connection had been severed, and the shallower eastern part retreated rapidly over the next several years. Especially large retreats in the eastern lobe of the Southern Sea appear to have occurred between 2005 and 2009, when drought limited and then cut off the flow of the Amu Darya. Water levels then fluctuated annually between 2009 and 2016 in alternately dry and wet years. In 2014, the Southern Sea’s eastern lobe completely disappeared.

As the inland “Sea of Islands” disappeared, it decimated the industry along its former banks. Unemployment and economic hardship for many fishermen and others are commonplace, while the region is heavily polluted, triggering serious public health issues.

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