From Khiva we returned to Urgench and caught a train to Nukus for a trip out to the Aral Sea, or what is left of it.
The Aral Sea is not a sea. It is a lake. A lake is enclosed by land whereas a sea is connected to the open ocean. That’s important in understanding the environmental catastrophe that has been imposed on the Aral Sea.
The Aral Sea lies on the border of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Until the late 1970s, it was the fourth largest lake in the world (after the Caspian Sea – also not a sea but a lake, Lake Superior and Lake Victoria). It was a very productive fishery, netting about 25,000 tonnes of fish per year, supporting a large fishing fleet and numerous towns, fish canning factories etc.
However in the 1960s the Soviets re-directed one of the two rivers that fed it, to support cotton farming in Kazakhstan. With less water flowing into it than is lost to evaporation, the sea commenced to shrink. It has shrunk from 66,000 square kms in 1980 to just 12,000 square kms in the 2000s and it continues to contract. The current water volume is 1/10th of previous and so densely saline the only thing now capable of living in it is some primitive worm.
This destroyed the fishing industry and associated economic activities of the Aral Sea, but irrigation from the diverted river did result in the conversion of some five million acres of desert in Kazakhstan into productive cotton farmland. So, was the diversion of water “one of the planet’s greatest environmental disasters” as stated by then United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in 2010 or an efficient use of water resources? That probably depends on whether you are an Uzbeki fisherman or a Kazakh cotton farmer.
Either way, the damage to the Uzbeki side really has to be seen to be believed.
We had a car and driver to take us out to where the sea used to be. It is now a vast expanse of muddy desert. We got bogged and had to be towed out. 
