Former Aral Sea bottom growing new forests

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan, Dec. 30 (UPI) -- Uzbek and German scientists are planting new forests on the former bottom of the Aral Sea in an effort to help promote the ecological recovery of the region.

The Aral is an inland sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, to the east of the Caspian Sea. At one time, it was the world's fourth-largest inland body of water -- after the Caspian Sea between Europe and Asia, Lake Superior in North America and Lake Victoria in Africa. It started to dry in the late 1960s as a result of human activity -- huge amounts of water were used for irrigation of cotton.

During the 1960s, nearly 76-billion cubic yards of water flowed from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers into the Aral each year. But it has been receiving very little water since 1986 due to irrigation offtake. Also, it loses 39-billion to 45.5-billion cubic yards a year to evaporation, according to the project's scientific adviser, Zinovy Novitsky.

As a result of these factors, the Aral's volume of water has fallen by 60 percent -- to 520-billion cubic yards -- and its surface area has shrunk by 36 percent -- to 17,000 square miles. The Aral also has separated into two lakes, called the Big Aral and the Small Aral.

In all, 10-million acres of its former bottom have dried up, Novitsky said. He has been working on the dried bottom of the Aral for 20 years and he defended his doctoral thesis on the scientific methods of growing forests on the former bottom.

The loss of water has caused many major problems. A new desert called Aralkum has arisen that already has consumed 5-million acres of arable land. Every year, 82.5-million tons of dust, sand and salt are blown into the atmosphere, settling back within 600 miles.

"Wind erosion of the former bottom of the Aral Sea has increased greatly -- 0.5 to 3.5 times -- in different points around the lake," Genady Golubev from Moscow State University wrote in an article titled, "Systems View of the Water Management in Central Asia."

"The salts transport goes along with it taking away ... about 110 million tons) a year" for the whole former lake bottom, Golubev wrote.

"Man is the cause of desertification and man is a victim," Novitsky said.

The situation has been aggravated by the uninhabited Vozrozhdeniye island, a former Soviet Union biological weapons test site. The island has become a peninsula that is shared by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. There is a possible link between the site and the poor health of many people in the region. Cholera, typhus, gastritis, blood cancer, asthma and bronchitis afflict the population. Infant mortality is high, the Aral Sea Homepage has reported.

So far, workers have planted 55,000 acres with high shrubs, including Haloxylon aphyllum, Salsola richteri and Galligonum caput medusae.

"These shrubs have acclimatized themselves to arid deserts," Novitsky said. They can stand very high temperatures and high salinity and take water from low underground levels, he added.

The roots of the shrubs grow parallel to the ground and fasten to the mix of sand, dust and salt. The parts growing above ground prevent erosion and can help act as windbreakers, decreasing velocity on the surface by 60 percent to 70 percent.

The new plants, bushes and trees will capture rain and snow that are crucial in the drought-affected Aral region, whose current annual precipitation averages only about 3 inches.

"Forests and woods create oxygen, kill microbes, improve climate and landscape," Evgeny Butkov, the head of the department of mountain land reclamation and ecology of the Uzbek Scientific Research Institute of Forestry, told United Press International.

Novitsky estimates about 1,325,000 acres should be covered with woods, but added it would be difficult to plant such a large area. Instead, workers will plant about 662,500 acres -- including Vozrozhdeniye island -- over 12 years. After five to six years the shrubs will start to produce seeds that will be spread by the wind.

Some of the area is unfit for planting, said Abdushukur Khanazarov, the director of the Institute of Forestry. The rivers carried chemicals that killed plants and insects in the Aral in large quantities and those areas still contain unsafe amounts of the chemicals.

The new planting project should be much cheaper than other possible solutions, Frank Hufler, the project's manager, told UPI. It costs about $152 to plant one hectare -- 2.5 acres -- he said, adding he is seeking $40 million to plant all 662,500 acres.

The project was started by the German Society for Technical Cooperation three years ago. The German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development allocated some financial resources.

"If the project is carried out, the cancerous growth (on the Aral Sea) will be eliminated," Hufler said.

Vadim Antonov, the technical director of the Vodproekt association of the Uzbek Ministry of Agriculture and Water Industry, called the project the only one showing results.

"It is impossible to restore the Aral, but it is necessary to make the area healthier," Antonov said.

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Marina Kozlova covers Central Asia for UPI Science News. E-mail sciencemail@upi.com