How The Flounder (and a Dane) Saved The Aral Sea (or a portion thereof)

by Thomas Goltz

The serrated basin stretches to the horizon in all directions, broken only by meandering herds of
free-range sheep, goat, cattle, horse and dromedary camels, all of which provide both dairy and meat
around these parts. The only fences defining anything seem to be around the occasional graveyard,
erected to keep the livestock from grazing on granddad's grave, lest the critters become unclean and
exempt from the grill for religious reasons.

The roads, meanwhile, are a wild mixture of perfectly smooth tarmac in the middle of nowhere
altering with stretches of pavement so broken and rutted that they can scarcely be called roads
anymore. Then there are the stretches of sand track, mile after mile, carved at crazy angles across the
bottom of the Central Asian wasteland called the Aral Sea.

It should be an relentlessly depressing ride, but is just the opposite. Rather than traveling
through this rough country to gawk at the world's greatest man-made disaster, we are on our way to
take a squint at a man-made miracle.

Then, after some three hours of lurching through the parched, oblate landscape of southern
Kazakhstan, a thin, blue-green ribbon of wonder appears in the distance: the Syr Darya River, a life-
line of water now bottled up by a ten mile-long dike designed to save the northern quarter of the Aral
from becoming part of the world's newest (and arguably, most toxic) desert, which the southern three
quarters appears doomed to become.

Water—here!

I cannot recall being so excited by H20 in my entire life.

Starting in the 1960s, and continuing to this day, the Aral Sea has been reduced from a surface
area of 68,000 kilometers (about the size of southern California or Ireland) to a tenth of that, losing the
equivalent of the water volume of Great Lakes Erie and Ontario in the process, and sliding in status
from being the fourth largest lake in the world (following the Caspian, Lake Superior and Lake
Victoria) to becoming something like the twentieth today, and still shrinking.

So much is well known.

National Geographic even uses the shrinking Aral Sea as a lesson plan for high school students.
In fact, the most shocking thing about the desiccation of the Aral is that it has been taking place in the
full light of day for nearly fifty years, and that so little has been done to save it.
As fishing villages became stranded in the growing desert that had once been lake bottom, and
brine-levels leaped from ten grams of salt per liter in the 1960s to 45 grams per liter in the 1980s and
even 100 grams per liter by the 1990s (ocean water is around 35 grams per liter), leading international
hydrology experts from around the world gathered at conference after conference to discuss the
problem, offer solutions and write both scientific and popular papers on the subject—and still the sea
receded.
One sideline to this relentlessly grim picture was the reduction of indigenous freshwater fish
stocks to almost zero, with the only fish that could survive in the Aral brine being sole (a dwarf
flounder), which had been imported from the Sea of Azov/Black Sea in the 1970s.
And therein lies the Cinderella story of the Aral Sea. Even while the larger catastrophe of the
doomed-to-be-desert southern (Uzbek) sector continues, the northern (Kazakh) Aral would appear to
have a future—and thanks to the lowly, non-native flounder, and a non-native, fisherman from distant
Denmark with a dream.
But I am getting ahead of the story.

To understand the Aral Sea basin one must look at its hydrology.
An 'endorheic' water system, it has no outlet and must balance evaporation in the Central Asian
summer heat by regenerating itself by the discharge of the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers. They
flow westward from the glaciers of the Tien Shan and Pamir mountain ranges, respectively, which are
the western-most ledge of the great mountain system known as the Hindu Kush, or western Himalayas.
Known to the ancient Greeks as the Jakartes and Oxus, and to the medieval Muslims as the
Sayhoun and Jayhoun (both are names of one of the four rivers of paradise as described in the Quran),
the Syr Darya rises in Kyrgyzstan and travels 1,380 miles to the Aral sea via Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan
and then Kazakhstan, while the southern and much larger stream, the Amu Darya, rises in upland
Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Some posit that the actual source is in an ice cave in the 5,000-
meter/15,000-foot Wakhan Corridor linking Afghanistan to China, an area often referred to as the
'Rooftop of the World' and the highest place on earth of permanent human inhabitation. From there, the
mighty stream tumbles and then meanders some 1,500 miles along the contemporary border between
Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan before finally discharging into the Aral Sea delta
in Uzbekistan.
Or so it used to discharge until sometime in the late 1950s, when the Amu Darya began to lose
volume, trickle and then disappear in new desert, which continued to grow.
The cause was easy to deduce, hydrologically-speaking.
Similar to the desiccation of the Colorado River to slack the thirst of Las Vegas and Los
Angeles, too much water was being taken out of the system.
In the case of the Aral, successive Soviet-style Five Year Plans demanded a huge increase in
rice, cotton and other agricultural production as part of the 'Virgin Lands' program to make the USSR
self-sufficient in essential commodities. To do this, a vast series of irrigation canals had been
constructed to drain off ever greater amounts of river water. Starting with the 'main' 1,250 km-long
Qaraqum Canal off the Amu Darya, that system now consists of some 15,000 to 20,000 kilometers of
irrigation trenches. In practical terms, this means the irrigation system is some ten to fifteen times
longer than the entire 'natural' Aral basin drainage system itself. Compounding the problem is the
shoddy construction of the drainage canals that has resulted in extraordinary leakage. Ironically, this
actually resulted in the creation of several new 'lakes,' the largest of which are the Sarymaysh and
Arnasai, although one scientific observer has suggested that both bodies are less lakes or even fetid
waste-water swamps than 'lacustrine systems.'
Thus, over the 1960s, the Aral was literally shrinking according to Gosplan (Soviet-style
Central Planning), and losing an average of 20 centimeters in depth each year. By the 1970s, that figure
had jumped to 50 cm per year--and that is when alarm bells began to ring. But still nothing was done,
aside from vague ideas of diverting north-flowing Siberian rivers south to the Aral at huge expense.
Said mega-projects were never implemented, and by mid-1980s, the annual dessication figure had
leaped to 90 cm per year, inviting one Soviet hydrologist to describe the Aral as 'a mistake of nature'
that was doomed to desiccate and die.
The following excerpt from a larger article entitled “Dessication of the Aral Sea: A water
management disaster in the Soviet Union” by Professor Philip P. Micklin, was printed in the journal
Science in 1988, and is typical of academic concern in the late 1980s:
“What does the future hold for the Aral Sea? By the year 2000, the sea could consist of a main body in the south
with the salinity of the open ocean and several small brine lakes in the north. Subsequently, assuming a residual inflow of
irrigation drainage water and ground water totaling around 10 km3, the southern sea will separate into two parts with an
aggregate area around 12,000 km2, 8% of the Aral's size in 1960. Salinity would rise to 140 grams per liter.

“This scenario is not inevitable. The sea's recession could be halted if considerably more water reached it. Water
balance calculations indicate that to maintain the 1987 size (41,000 km2) would require river inflow around 30 km3 per
year. This discharge is possible if consumptive irrigation withdrawals from the Amu Dar'ya and Syr Dar'ya were to be
markedly reduced. However, irrigation is the economic mainstay of the Aral Sea basin where over 90% of the harvest comes
from irrigated lands. Although plans for irrigation expansion in the Aral Sea basin have been somewhat scaled back under
the (Soviet President Mikhail) Gorbachev regime in light of the region's ecological problems and strained water balance,
many water management experts see continued growth of this sector a necessity...”

Professor Micklin's gloomy prognosis turned out to be far too optimistic.

At the time of his research, the water that once lapped the docks of the Uzbek town of Maynog
on the southern shore of the Aral (and point where the Amu Darya delta should flow into the sea) had
receded to the point where the authorities felt compelled to dig a channel between the harbor and the
new shoreline, and then failed to keep pace as the waters receded further. Eventually, and with the town
some fifty miles from the water, they gave up, leaving scores of fishing vessels stranded in the sand and
resulting in bizarre (if highly photographic) 'ship cemeteries.' A similar process was underway in the
(northern) Kazakh sector, where the boats were also stranded on sand miles from the receding sea.
Then in 1987, a sandbar emerged along a shallow ridge, and continued to grow, marking the
first division of the Aral into northern and southern seas. Again, frantic work to carve a channel
provided temporary relief, but by 1990 the division had become permanent. As for all the advice being
given by outside experts, the erstwhile mayor of the Kazakh harbor town of Aralsk cynically remarked:
'If every person attending every conference on the Aral brought a bucket of water to dump in the Aral,
the problem would have been solved long ago.'

The collapse of the USSR in 1991 with the concomitant loss of the Kremlin's authority in the
five new independent post-Soviet states sharing the Aral riparian system/drainage basin saw an even
more accelerated parching of the Aral Sea. The energy-poor and source water/highland states of
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan wanted to build hydro-dams, while thinly inhabited Turkmenistan,
technically a Aral basin state, remained largely outside of the debate--even while the UN suggested the
creation of a super-Aral region to be recognized as a “sixth interested state” for water allocation, with
an eye for the eventual inclusion of a seventh country with a stake in the increasingly acrimonious
discussion, namely, the upland confusion known as Afghanistan.
But it the two post-Soviet states that shared the Aral shore itself that were key, and their attitude
might be summed up as the following: Kazakhstan was desperate to save the Aral and its fishing
industry by keeping the Syr Darya flowing into its northern sector, while Uzbekistan, having emerged
as a world-wide player in the global cotton market, evinced complete indifference to the fact that the
Amu Darya disappeared in new desert, hundreds of kilometers from its Aral Sea shore.
One of the first conferences organized by newly independent Kazakhstan in 1991, the
government of Nursultan Nazarbayev invited Western environmental organisations to visit and discuss
not one but two ecological disaster zones: the disappearing Aral Sea and the human and environmental
fall-out of the Soviet-era nuclear bomb testing zone of Semipalatinsk. While the latter subject remains a
compelling and deeply controversial subject (paranoid locals maintain that secret testing continues to
this day), it was the former subject that had attracted the attention of a Danish delegate, a former
fisherman by the name of Kurt Bertelsen Christensen. Not content to just discuss the issue of the
vanishing Aral in the capital, Christensen convinced one of his hosts, Kazakh Professor of Biology Dr.
Makhambet Tairov, to make an inspection trip to the northern shore of the Aral to visit the dusty and
dying town of Aralsk. The town, once famous for it Soviet-era canning factory that had once provided
80 train wagon-loads of dried and canned fish “for Lenin's sake” to help defend the Soviet Motherland
during World War II (or so it is represented in a huge, worker glory-soaked Soviet Realism mural at the
Aralsk train station), had been reduced to import fish products from other parts of the USSR to stay in
production, and then gone out of business completely. Its 3,000 employees, unpaid for years, were
obliged to divvy up everything of perceived value (chairs, doors and even bricks) in lieu of salaries,
and seek work elsewhere. The depressing picture observed by Christensen was made complete with a
visit to the former fishing village of Jumbyl, now dozens of miles from the the increasingly brackish
water.

“It was surreal and traumatic,” Christensen recalled, referring to the plight of his Kazakh fishing
colleagues and their 'ship cemetery' of stranded boats. “I knew I had to get back there and do
something, if only to tell the story of the fishermen whose lives had become mere pawns in big-water
politics to the outside world.”

Three long years (and many an Aral-related conference) passed before Christensen was able to
return—and then serendipity struck.
 The venue was once again Jambyl village, and one night discussion turned to the subject of so
the dwarf flounder imported in the 1970s to the increasingly saline Aral from the Sea of Azov.
Almost detested by locals because of the fish's odd, unnatural appearance—black-on-top, white-
on-bottom with both eyes on one side of the head—it was virtually the only fish left in the shrinking
Aral, but difficult to catch. The bookkeeper of the local (and almost entirely dysfunctional) cooperative
(a man by the name of Tolagai Ualiev) remembered that there was an Russian book in his library on
fishing techniques in which Danish seine fishing for North Sea flounder was praised for its efficiency.
He brought back the volume, which had been published in the 1930s, and showed it around.
“It was an epiphany moment,” recalled Henrik Jøker Bjerre, a Danish philosopher who had
accompanied Christensen on the return visit to the Aral in 1994. “Rather than beating our heads against
bureaucratic doors to get governments to reduce cotton production and thus allow the Amu Daria and
Syr Darya to flow freely into the Aral in sufficient quantity to refill the basin, we returned home with
an actionable idea.”
Flounder.
In retrospect, that idea was so elegantly obvious because it was so ordinary: increase
productivity by teaching local fishermen more effective harvesting techniques.
The problem was how to implement a program to save the Aral Sea based on catching a non-
native fish...
Finally, in September 1996, a joint group of Danish and Kazakh fishermen set out on the waters
of the Aral from the village of Tastubek for a trial fishing expedition using Danish seine nets. The
results were beyond astounding: from virtually no fish caught in1995, the harvest leaped to some 50
tons in 1996 and then to nearly 1,500 tons in 1997.

“No one had caught anything of significance for at least twenty years, so our immediate
problem was figuring out what to do with the catch,” Christensen recalled.

Modest grants and loans from Copenhagen resulted in the acquisition of several refrigerator
storage facilities in the Aralsk area, as well as several refrigerator trucks to bring the dwarf flounder to
distant markets in Russia, Ukraine and Georgia, where sole is cherished for its delicate taste. Next, in
1998, and based on the prospect of a boom in the fish harvest, Christensen, Bjerre and Dr. Tairov and
others created an NGO called simply 'Aral Tenizi,' or Aral Sea Foundation. Funding for ten years was
provided by the Danish International Development Assistance (DANIDA) to the tune of two million
dollars.
But still the Aral retreated, leaving even the newly created cold-storage facilities further and
further from the shore. It was then that the Aral Sea Foundation came up with a dramatic idea: refill the
Aral Sea, or at least that part of it that might still be saved, in order to save the flounder, in order to
save the sole fishing industry that had been saved by Kurt Christensen.
That 'Save the Sole' project came in the form of a $2.5 million, 10 mile-long earthen dike built
by local volunteers across an estuary just south of the mouth of confluence of the Syr Darya and a
shallow spot between the so-called “dog's head” shaped northern quarter of the Aral and the southern
three quarters, even then separated by a 50-mile (and growing) stretch of desert, into which the
precious waters of the Syr Darya emptied into wasteland.
The dam (or dike) held for two years, but was breached by unexpected in-flow and washed
away into the growing desert between the two Aral seas.
But the resilience and determination of the local population in the face of economic and
environmental catastrophe had been noticed, both at home and abroad. In a last ditch effort to save the
northern quarter of the sea, the Kazakh government of President Nursultan Nazarbayev secured a $60
million loan from the World Bank and, kicking in an additional $26 million from Kazakh oil sources,
rebuilt the causeway/dike in cement, thus putting a permanent cork in place—and permanently
separating the two Aral seas.
The first result was the remarkably rapid refilling of formerly dessicated areas in the area now
known as the North Aral Sea. From a maximum depth of 30 meters (98 feet) in 1991, the northern
sector of the Aral had risen to 38 meters (125 feet) by the completion of the cement dike in 2003, to rise
further to 40 meters (132 feet) in 2005, with an optimal depth of 42 meters (138 feet) obtained in 2008.
Future plans include the construction of a $120 million second dike some four meters higher than the
first on the northeast corner of the sea (and about 65 kilometers from Aralsk) that will create a two-
tiered North Aral system, with the higher body filled via a 50 kilometer-long channel from the Syr
Daria reservoir. When completed—2114 is the target date—it will eventually bring water back to the
dessicated harbor at Aralsk that last saw any real moisture in the mid 1970s, and is still some 10 miles
from the water's edge, although it is creeping closer and closer.

Salinity in the new North Aral Sea, meanwhile, dropped from 45 grams per liter to twelve
grams per liter today. More to the point, the infusion and retention of fresh water from the Syr Daria
soon resulted in a man-made miracle: the return of some 15 species of fresh-water fish, and with them
the return of the livelihoods of fishermen, boat-builders, canners, bazaar merchants and sundry others.

“Miraculous Catch in Kazakh North Aral Sea,” boomed the title of a 2006 World Bank report
on the project, describing the low-lying causeway/dike as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”
 But the hyped-up claim did contain a central truth: considered doomed to desiccation little more
than a decade ago, the Aral Sea (or a portion thereof) was actually growing in surface and volume, and
to the point that there is almost too much water during the May/June surge of the Syr Darya.
“When the levy and dam were finished in 2005, the prediction was that the North Aral would
reach the desired water level over a period of a year and a half,” recalled Serik Duisenbayev, office
manager of the Aralsk-based Aral Sea Foundation, and the son of a former boat building father and fish
factory mother. “But it filled in just six months—and then began to spill over.”
The result was that thousands of fresh-water fish found themselves being sucked though the
nine gates at the southern end of the sea and flushed into a 10 kilometer long 'channel to nowhere'
leading into the desert to rot. Unanticipated amounts of spring run-off in 2007 led to a similar fish-kill
in the channel, and again in 2008. A similar fish-flush disaster should be averted in 2009 with the
completion of the second dam and spillway some 30 miles further up the Syr Darya delta.

Meanwhile, the 'Kambala Baliq Kombinat,' or 'Flounder Fish Factory' that opened in Aralsk
with such fanfare is 2003, was closed in 2008 due to a lack of sufficient flounder to can: weirdly and
ironically, the main victim of the North Aral success story appears to be the lowly sole. The rapid
desalinization of the North Aral has led to a huge drop in the harvest of the once despised salt-water
fish, and one can anticipate the day when sole will become extinct in the revived Aral, with the paradox
being that it was the very presence of the dwarf flounder that indirectly led to the salvage of the
(northern quarter) of the sea itself.
“I guess we will just have to come up for a new name for our fish factory,” smiled Serik
Duisenbeyev . “The biggest problem right now is off-season poaching of freshwater fish.”
Indeed, just above the spillway that separates the green-blue waters of the North Aral from the
vast, salt-stained wasteland south of the causeway cut by the so-called 'channel of death,' a fisherman
named Haydoulet is literally hauling in fish after gill-netted fish from his favorite hole.
A native of Karateren, one of three small, mud brick fishing villages that used to be on the
northeast Aral shore, and virtually abandoned twenty years ago but which are all seeing a miniature
building boom nowadays, Haydoulet had already caught some 40 kilos (90 pounds) of diverse carp,
pike and even small sturgeon.
“This is fishin',” he crowed.
 His catch, legal or other, would fetch him an average price of around 150 Tenge ($1.00) per kilo
in the lively Aralsk city market.
Upstream, another pair of fishermen are off-loading three huge sacks of fish from their skiff to
be loaded into an awaiting VAZ jeep. Above the dam, another fisherman is negotiating his three-
wheeler motorcycle down a sand path that was once the shallow sea bottom, but now a mass of brush
and open-range feeding lot for horses, camels and sheep. A ten foot rowboat is strapped to the sidecar
along with his nets, and a poacher's smirk plastered on his face.
Back in dusty but somewhat restored town of Aralsk, Serik Duisenbeyev and some friends meet
in the basic bar and restaurant associated with the only (and admittedly rather run-down) hotel in town,
to scarf down a species of bream, washing all down with Aral beer, now made with local water drawn
from aquifers replenished by the no-longer vanishing North Aral Sea.
The town's motto, written on banner and scrawled on walls throughout the dusty little city is
simple: 'Water Is Coming!'

As for Kurt Christensen, he last visited the region in 2008, along with his friend and travelling
companion Henrik Jøker Bjerre. On the the friendly if gruelling 48 hour train ride across Kazakhstan
from Alma Ata to Aralsk, the pair tried to estimate how many visits they had made over the preceding
fourteen years, and how much time they had compositely spent there over the years. It added up to
around four years, of which Kurt could claim three quarters, mostly in one-month visits.
“The Aral Sea area has become a second homeland,” Christensen reflected. “And I am proud of
that association, because its story teaches us a profound lesson. The exploitation of the Syr Darya and
Amu Darya rivers without regard for the consequences led to the man-made catastrophe is the Aral. We
are witnessing other pending global environmental catastrophes in other areas, too-- yet we do little or
nothing about them. Let the story of the Aral serve both as a warning of consequences run amok and as
an inspiration that it is never too late to try and turn back the clock.”
Sadly, while this may be true for the North Aral, it is is a success story that must be regarded as
a product of environmental triage.
And the southern sector of the Aral?
It appears condemned to death by the authorities in Uzbekistan.
Ironically, the only 'growth industry' associated with that part of the erstwhile fourth largest lake
in the world are Tashkent-based disaster tours to the pathetic (if photogenic) ship cemeteries outside the
former fishing towns of Nukkus and Maygop, now also blighted by swirling clouds of pesticide
particulate that settled on the lake bottom when water still flushed from the Amu Darya canal system,
and subject to the highest infant mortality rate in all the lands that once made up the USSR.
By one estimate, even if the government of Uzbekistan were to do an about-face and cease all
irrigation--and thus embrace the catastrophic economic and social consequences of that act--it would
take fifty years to refill the sea.
Currently, the briny pot holes and ponds of what still remains has a salt content three times that
of the ocean, and rising
Not even a flounder can save it now.