by Peggy Barnett

Created on: February 15, 2007   Last Updated: May 02, 2007

Water, as a resource on the planet, has become a commodity much abused, since it is too often taken for granted. Many feats of modern engineering, involved in re-routing bodies of water, in order to use or consume the water immediately, have resulted in massive devastation to the ecosystems involved, which has also created damage to the larger ecosystem they are a part of.

To use an analogy, if the network river of fluid required by humans were diverted from one part of the human body to another, the part from which the fluid is diverted would either die or suffer damage, perhaps irreparable. The planet, as a living organism, responds similarly in its parts.

Formerly one of the largest lakes in Asia, the Aral Sea was once home to fleets of fishing boats that preyed upon sturgeon and other game fish. The volume of the Aral Sea keeps shrinking, however. With a volume loss of 80% since 1960, the region has lost 15,680 square miles of lake water. The fishing boats, which, in former times, were docked upon the lake, now rest on the dry land exposed as the waters receded, abandoned by their owners. Approximately 8,920 square miles of lake remain.

In 1960, the Aral Sea was 230 miles long, 175 miles wide and ranged from 55 feet to 223 feet in depth. Two rivers, the Amu Darya or Oxus River and the Syr Darya or Jaxartes River, flowed in to the Aral Sea.

A part of the U.S.S.R., the Soviet government envisioned a new use for the rivers that fed the Aral Sea, to benefit the Soviet people. By diverting the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, it would be possible to irrigate the desert nearby the Aral Sea in order to grow cotton. By removing the waters that fed the Aral Sea, the Sea began to shrink.

As the water receded, the sand, dirt and other sediments that formed the bottom of the Aral Sea were exposed to the air. With no plant life to hold it in place, dust storms began to occur in the space formerly occupied by the lake. The dust scattered far from its original location and mixed with the rain and snow that fell in other locations. Near Omsk, in far-off Siberia, orange, yellow and green snow began to fall. The source of the color in the snow was traced back to the dust storms at the Aral Sea.

After the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., the Aral Sea formed part of the border between the republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Even though the Aral Sea borders the two countries, the rivers that fed the Aral Sea cross through four countries (Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan),

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