<<< ... The Aral Sea is a tragic example of Soviet economic planning gone badly
awry. In the 1960s, Moscow built an 850-mile canal designed to facilitate the
irrigation of cotton fields. It got the water for this by diverting two rivers, the
Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. These two rivers, though, were the primary
sources for the Aral Sea. I suppose the Soviet engineers figured that the Aral
might dry up a little and that towns and villages on the shore might find
themselves no more than, say, a mile from the water's edge. To help make up
for the loss, they did plan to divert water from Siberia, but somehow this
never got done.
Result: Over the next 30 years, two-thirds of the Aral Sea vanished, leaving
behind a dry bed of poisonous salts and killing the sea's fish and its seaside
vegetation. Now more than 100 million tons of salty dust gets blown into the
air each year from the dry seabed. This is a toxic silt composed of salt, sand,
fertilizers, DDT, and industrial and household poisons. Local children have
become ill from these toxins. Life expectancy here has fallen.
The Aral salt bed has become as dangerous to the entire planet as a large
active volcano. It sits in the path of strong east-to-west air currents that carry
these deadly contaminants to the upper layers of the atmosphere, where they
are spread around the Earth. The signatures of Aral toxins have been found in
the blood of penguins in the Antarctic. Its distinctive dust has fallen on
glaciers in Greenland, forests in Norway, and wheat fields in Belarus ... >>>
worth.com
Tom |
