The newest satelliite photo from NASA shows the Aral Sea continuing its disappearing act, while the Little Aral to the north continues to gain back lost ground. The dam in the north is holding, and even following record lows for the Syr Darya River this last year, it continues its growth. The Aral proper’s lobes are even more separated, and the East lobe shows signs that it will soon be completely nonexistent.
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Michael Hancock-Parmer – author of 153 posts on Registan.net.
PhD student in Central Eurasian Studies and Russian History at Indiana University
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By any chance would this have anything to do with how Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are each managing the sea? In other words, is this because Kazakhstan is doing a good job and Uzbekistan a poor one?
Is the 2005 marker misplaced?
I was wondering the same thing – it would seem that 2005 was a bumper year for the Aral Sea. There’s a great animated map showing the march of the shoreline here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forty-first_(1956_film)
there was a soviet movie showing storms and islands of the aral sea made a few years before the dams were built (a love story between the red and the white amid the war right after the october revolution)