Bringing life back to Asia's 'dead' sea

[kristopher]

The Aral Sea is not dead, it was just waiting for better days. Now I think those better days have come.
--Serik Duisenbayv

Aralsk, Kazakhstan (CNN) -- Serik Duisenbayv was 17-years-old before he saw the Aral Sea. "When I was born the sea wasn't in Aralsk, I had only heard about it from my parents and from history books," he told CNN.

"When I saw it for the first time I was very sad that people had had to live without the sea for almost 40 years. But now we have hope. Now the sea is only 50km from Aralsk and maybe one day the water will be in the old harbor once again."

The shrinking of the Aral Sea has been described as one of the world's most shocking man-made environmental disasters. The sea lost over 90 percent of its area after the rivers that fed it were diverted to irrigate cotton crops elsewhere in the arid region in the 1960s.

As the water retreated, the sea became too saline for fish to survive, killing off the people's livelihoods and, with it, their hope. The retreat of the Aral Sea has left...

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/05/26/aral.sea/?hpt=C1

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Interesting - a little more background here

http://unimaps.com/aral-north/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dike_Kokaral

Basically, they're trying to revive a small northern section of the old Aral Sea first, while leaving the main part to continue drying up, for now.