Aral Sea Basin Almost Completely Dry 151
An anonymous reader writes: In 2000, NASA began taking satellite images of the Aral Sea in central Asia, which was once the fourth-largest inland lake in the world. At that time, there was an expansive eastern basin, and smaller basins to the north and west. In images recorded just last week, we see that the eastern basin is completely gone, and the western basin just a thin strip of water. The local fishing industry has been devastated, old ship graveyards now rest on dry ground, and salt-heavy sand is being blown around the region, causing health issues.
Most of the lake's decline is attributable to human intervention: "In the 1950s, two of the region's major rivers – the Amu Darya and and the Syr Darya – were diverted by the Soviet government to provide irrigation for cotton production in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, starving the Aral. It has been diminishing ever since, with the sea level dropping 16 meters between 1960 and 1996, according to the World Bank. Water levels are believed to be down to less than 10 per cent of what they were five decades ago." Low levels of rain and snow didn't help.
Most of the lake's decline is attributable to human intervention: "In the 1950s, two of the region's major rivers – the Amu Darya and and the Syr Darya – were diverted by the Soviet government to provide irrigation for cotton production in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, starving the Aral. It has been diminishing ever since, with the sea level dropping 16 meters between 1960 and 1996, according to the World Bank. Water levels are believed to be down to less than 10 per cent of what they were five decades ago." Low levels of rain and snow didn't help.
The water wars are coming (Score:1)
Too many meatbags on this Earth. Lake/river water has to be diverted for farming for all the people. There won't be any water left before you know it.
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Won't these ultimately just be energy wars? We won't run out of water, just low energy input drinkable water.
The fight will be (err, maybe already is) over the energy resources necessary to do stuff like desal and purification.
And the summary says that the water was diverted for cotton farming which probably is more of a result of some bad central planning goal for self-reliance since most of the Soviet Union isn't great for cotton farming.
Re:The water wars are coming (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think this particular story is a harbinger of that. Rather, I think it's a story of monumental stupidity caused by a totalitarian government that didn't bother looking forward, and was too eager by half to waggle their technological penises in front of the world.
The rivers feeding the Aral Sea haven't dried up - just that most of it got diverted to other uses, and the Aral Sea was the unfortunate loser in that bargain.
I don't disagree that yeah, potable water is going to eventually be a problem as climate slowly shifts and population grows. The climate and population growth are debatable and mostly unknown as to rate, direction and cause, but change they will.
Re:The water wars are coming (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to be too contrarian, but before we declare this an unmitigated disaster, shouldn't the cost of the destruction of the Aral sea be measured against the benefits of provided by the water that used to flow into it?
I have no idea of the numbers, but if we're talking about the 100,000 people having their livelihood destroyed and their environment destroyed so that millions can proper elsewhere, that might seem to be a fair trade-off to the government.
After all, I'm a North American, so unless I'm a huge hypocrite and also view North America as an unmitigated disaster, I have admit that the prosperity of my nation has only been achieved by the wholesale destruction of many others (the Native Americans).
There are *always* trade-offs. Unless we've got an accounting of both the costs and the benefits, who's to say the Aral sea decision was a failure?
Re:The water wars are coming (Score:5, Interesting)
Even the people that want to restore the lake don't argue the benefits of redirecting the water. The problem is how it's been redirected. The soviets litterally dug trenches through sand to get it where they wanted. It's not in pipes, it's not through pumps. The water travels over sand through an open air canal in the desert. Estimates are that less than 15% of it actually gets to the farm fields. If they fixed the canals they could have both the farm land and the sea.
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Ah, thanks for the correction. I should have read more deeply.
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I think the question is, given when it was done and the resources the country had at that time, could it be done right back then on the same or otherwise reasonable timeframe?
Obviously, it can be fixed now, but it sounds like it's way too late for that to have a meaningful effect.
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After all, I'm a North American, so unless I'm a huge hypocrite and also view North America as an unmitigated disaster,
The political indoctrination that you have received has obviously been successful in filling you with an irrational self-loathing. Stop the hate including the self-hatred.
I have admit that the prosperity of my nation has only been achieved by the wholesale destruction of many others (the Native Americans).
Careful estimates of pre-Columbian Amerindian populations in what is now the U.S. and Canada have shown that the population of Amerindians today is several times larger than it was before 1492. Amerindians have benefited from modern agriculture just like everyone else. Sure, the Amerindian cultures were mostly wiped-out, but that is no
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Water was not diverted directly from the sea. It was diverted from the rivers that feed the sea, and it's still being diverted (the rivers are not going away any time soon), so the benefits remain - what's "short term" about them?
Re:The water wars are coming (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to be too contrarian, but before we declare this an unmitigated disaster, shouldn't the cost of the destruction of the Aral sea be measured against the benefits of provided by the water that used to flow into it?
The soviet scientists involved with the water diversion were aware that the Aral sea would eventually dry up. In fact, the decline in sea level was observable from the very beginning. It is true the lake drying up was an intended and foreseen consequence.
However, what was unforeseen were the ecological consequences of the lake drying up, that has turned the dry lake bed into a salt desert where dust storms kicking up toxic sediments are a common occurrence. Without a large body of water to moderate the weather, nearby communities now experience hotter summers and colder winters. In effect, one desert has been traded for another.
And while diverting water for agricultural uses might be beneficial, most of the canals used for the diversion are not properly lined, experiencing significant water wastage during transport. And most of this water is being used for water-intensive crops like cotton and rice. Were good irrigation practices used, and if more suitable crops that required less water were used instead, it is likely only a fraction of the water would be needed. It also has to be kept in mind that the economic benefits agricultural irrigation has brought has to be balanced the economic loss resulting from the loss of fishery in the area,loss of tourism (some of the villages were once seaside resorts), and economic hardship resulting from the ecological changes to the landscape
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Oh, so it's NOT an unmitigated disaster. It's a mitigated disaster. That's much better!
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There are other factors in this situation as pointed out just above, but as far as your comment goes, you are *exactly* right.
Almost every condition of existence is a mitigated disaster.
The very existence of a modern society has caused untold destruction on the environment. However, the fact that we like being alive is presumably a good that makes our existence a "mitigated disaster".
So, yes, I'd call a mitigated disaster much better. In fact, that's the best you can hope for, aside from pretending the pe
Contrarian (Score:2)
Always two sides to every story. The opposite, yet similar situation is when rivers are dammed up for hydro power, this usually "destroys" the land behind it with flooding to form a reservoir. In extreme examples like the diversion above which are monumental engineering feats you have the huge dam in China that swallowed up huge tracts of land including whole villages. Again, measured negative VS positive...
Even in smaller situations you have issues with wildlife ecology destruction, and native issues... Th
Re:The water wars are coming (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup, this is what you get when a short-sighted totalitarian government messes with the water cycle to enable farming in a desert, consequences be damned.
Come to think of it, California is what you get when a short-sighted democratic government messes with the water cycle to enable farming in a desert, consequences be damned.
Let's face it, environmental concerns wasn't really on any government's radar until the 70s. (And a lot of countries still try to ignore them...)
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Except it's not democrats.
The central valley of california, and its elected representatives, are mostly republican.
Even the few who are not, have to bow to the interests of BigAg if they want to keep their jobs.
Even more than California, look to the Colorado River.
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1) San Francisco uses less water per capita than any large city in the country, and uses less than half that of the state-wide average. See http://sfwater.org/index.aspx?page=760
2) Agriculture uses 80% of the developed (i.e. captured and diverted) water supply. See http://www.arb.ca.gov/fuels/lcfs/workgroups/lcfssustain/hanson.pdf
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E=mc^2, so you might be right. In the end almost any problem can be formulated as an energy problem.
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Re:The water wars are coming (Score:4, Funny)
Back in my day we calculated war efforts in megapanzers.
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Southern California is a desert. They're not running out of water, they're running out of water to steal.
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Turns out huge amounts of farming doesn't do much good if there's not a large population to feed. Humanity has had plenty of water wars in the past, and it's quite reasonable to say they will in the future.
But on the technological horizon, there's altered graphene based desalinization. It may be possible to efficiently generate drinking/farming water from the oceans, which will end this problem.
For now this is an artifact of the whole "China is growing unsustainably" phenomenon, and not some huge trend ab
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Which ocean are you going to take your water for desalinisation into the Aral Sea area from? The Indian, Arctic, or Pacific? (I wouldn't waste time trying to take it from the Caspian, Black or Mediterranean seas - the Caspian is already isolated and you'd just move the problem ; and the others are at the far end of lit
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Not in volumes necessary to both do agriculture and keep the area sea basin wet.
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Re:The water wars are coming (Score:4, Insightful)
The water will still be there, but it will be used to benefit people and the organisms we value. There is a finite volume (*) of life the earth can support -- what we're down to is how it ought to be divided and the choice we are making is that the only organisms worth anything, are people, cows, pigs, chickens, and corn. Our population problem is an extremely unpopular topic, but by ignoring it, we will eventually destroy all the interesting biodiversity we have in the world in exchange for a monocrop of people, along with the very few organisms people tend to value, and the diseases and parasites associated with those.
(*) by weight if you will(**), not individual count.
(**) differences in body composition make "weight" not exactly accurate as some things have greater density due to the use of different minerals (hard shells or bones as a percent of body mass for example). What can be said is that there is a finite amount of stuff on the earth that can be mixed up in different ways into a finite total amount of life. The question we should ask is, what is a smart or wise percentage of that total, that we humans and the plants/animals we value, should comprise.
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It's not the # of meatbags thats the problem. It's their distribution and quality. Quantity is not really a factor here. Unless you think decreasing Quantity will some how magically increase quality and stop meatbags from distributing themselves poorly again.
Nope
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It's not the # of meatbags thats the problem. It's their distribution and quality. Quantity is not really a factor here. Unless you think decreasing Quantity will some how magically increase quality and stop meatbags from distributing themselves poorly again.
Nope
Well yes, it's those other low-quallity people over there that has to reduce their population, not us high-quality people here!
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My grandfather was a geologist, during the oil crisis of the 70s, he essentially said bah, the real problem will be water in the 2000's
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All the water that used to be in the Aral Sea, had to go somewhere. Today it is in the oceans, raising global sea levels by several millimeters.
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Before evaporating away most of that water is going into cotton fields in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, diverted from the Amu Darya river into a network of channels. Turkmens are also building lakes in the desert. The latest news I found about that are here [azernews.az].
As someone already wrote in a comment here, "too many meatbags on the planet", water can't be left alone.
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All the water that used to be in the Aral Sea, had to go somewhere. Today it is in the oceans, raising global sea levels by several millimeters.
I can see not reading the article, it is Slashdot, but to jump to comment before even the second paragraph of the summary ... that just leads to embarrassment.
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Aral Sea is now split between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan; Russia is not involved anymore.
So it is not? (Score:1)
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The old Soviet Union did enough ecological damage without having to hang that subject on it...
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Not quite but if they rebuilt the canals using concrete instead of sand it would retore part of the lake.
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No, that's only the nearly statewide class 4 drought that has hit California. [eurekalert.org]
You know, the one that made it illegal to wait for you water to heat up. [medium.com]
Stop blaming the Soviets (Score:2, Informative)
The Soviet Union is dead 15 years ago. The situation has progressively gotten worse as MORE, not less water was diverted.
The current fuckup has little to do with what the Soviet Union's master plan was in 1960s and can be blamed 100% on what people continued to do in more recent years.
Anyway, just read the wikipedia page on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Stop blaming the Soviets (Score:5, Insightful)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
* salt is ruining the "farmland" because the entire water table is rising along with the salt that is in the soil
* salt from the Aral Sea is blowing around, ruining more "farmland"
* short term gain, for long term pain? That always is nice.
* the area used to be a resort area with booming fishing, now, it's a desert with stunted farm crops.
You see, there are proper ways to farm in that area, inappropriate ways and then there are the truly fucked up ways to farm. They picked th
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Re:Stop blaming the Soviets (Score:5, Insightful)
As an environmentalist, that's so incredibly simplistic, I'd almost call this post an attempt at parodying environmentalist positions. Luckily I'm aware that people who sometimes agree with me do so for simplistic reasons.
Organized, structured, large scale farming does less ecological and environmental harm than the people those farms would feed instead scrounging for food or running ad-hoc microfarms. Not to mention the human costs to those changes, like malnutrition and economic loss.
Now, if we pave every forest, turn every grassland into grazeland for cattle, and net every fish in the ocean, we've fucked up. We've fucked up badly. Good environmentalism is about being stewards who recognize our planetary ecosystems are irreplaceable and providing incredible value to us as a species, as well as the unique and unmeasurable quality that each species and ecosystem represents that can never be replaced once gone.
No one is saying you can't worship nature as some manifestation of perfection, just that we'll take it as seriously as we take any other religion.
Thanks (Score:2)
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At one time there were more reasonable and nuanced positions on Slashdot...you must be new here.
I call bullshit.. (Score:1)
Organized, structured, large scale farming does less ecological and environmental harm than the people those farms would feed instead scrounging for food or running ad-hoc microfarms.
Can you provide citations for this?
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Can you provide citations for this?
Everybody knows that if you grow most of your own food on a 1/4 acre of yard, it's much worse for the environment than if you hire a company to maintain a pristine lawn there and drive down to the Whole Foods in your SUV to buy produce flown in from Chile.
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We're talking about the very divided urban/rural China here, not the US where we have widespread suburban recreational agriculture like you're describing. Urban Sprawl is a monstrosity caused by all sorts of poorly reasoned policies, and in the US it's probably the single biggest source of unnecessary environmental harm.
As for a general scientific citation about the costs of microfarming versus organized industrial scale farming I'm going to have to say I don't have one. For multiple reasons, the first pe
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As for a general scientific citation about the costs of microfarming versus organized industrial scale farming I'm going to have to say I don't have one.
In other words...bullshit. I do appreciate the honesty all the same, albeit buried within other irrelevant drivel.
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I have to agree with MaiseMan - your comment is entirely too sane and rational to be on /. discussing a hotbutton issue.
So, who are you really, and what have you done with i kan reed?
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You know I get one of these "Hey! You're acting sane for once." posts almost every day, right? You can see why that might not help shape the impression you're so clearly striving for(i.e. getting me to ask myself why I don't always act sane), I hope.
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Oh, well, I do get those messages about once every other day. So you'll forgive me seeing you as Yet Another Person Doing It, right?
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Luckily I'm aware that people who sometimes agree with me do so for simplistic reasons.
I think I already addressed concerns like yours in my post.
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nature is so much worth than farming.
So stop eating farmed food. Or stop being a hypocrite - either would be acceptable.
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According to the linked Wiki article:
So the plan from the beginning was to have the A
This ain't good (Score:1)
The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years (Score:1)
Read Atimatov's book and you will get a feeling for what splendor the Aral Sea was.
And just so recently do to human avarice has it been utterly destroyed.
The hard questions now are:
How much money has been drained away in restoration efforts to date?
How much money will be drained away in more failed restoration efforts?
We just keep taking and giving only poison back.
This is just more proof we do not deserve to be curators of this fantastic place.
Humans are hideous and ignorant not by nature, but by pure choi
Check Out Lake Powell (Score:5, Informative)
http://earthobservatory.nasa.g... [nasa.gov]
Quite startling, how the water levels change. But read the article to see why this is happening, and where it's going. It seems it doesn't take a "totalitarian government" to do stupid, short-sighted things. But hey, enjoy your golf at Vegas, hear? And the water shows.
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Here's the proper link:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldOfChange/lake_powell.php
Re:Check Out Lake Powell (Score:4, Informative)
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Actual link:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.g... [nasa.gov]
That's because of drought, not because of something stupid and short sighted.
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seems like it doesn't take a totalitarian government to do stupid things like putting ... in an URL on /. either
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Kill two birds with one stone (Score:2)
I'm sure it's economically impractical, but it strikes me that filling some of the worlds emptying water basins by towing large antarctic icebergs to a nearby port and then breaking them up for shipment is a win-win scenario.
Obvious downside: fossil fuel use to get water where it is most useful may exacerbate the problem over time.
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Why not use the fuel instead to pump and desalinate ocean water?
The Aral is problematic because it's far from the ocean, but you could pump and desal from the Black Sea to the Caspian and then pump from Caspian to Aral. It'd be 600 miles or so of total pipeline, but it would really depend on how much you could desal and pump and if that volume would even make a difference.
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Obvious downside: fossil fuel use to get water where it is most useful may exacerbate the problem over time.
We know just fine how to build nuclear-powered ocean vessels. Maybe Congress can give the corporate welfare to the MIC to build iceberg haulers instead of battleships.
Since we're on the subject, does anybody know how to calculate the centripetal and gravity effects of a long-range tunnel bored through the earth's crust? I suspect there must be a maximum achievable tunnel length but also maybe the ro
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Two things:
1) noone has ever built a nuclear-powered battleship.
2) noone has built a battleship at all since WW2.
Okay, three things: if you want to use nuclear power to tow icebergs, how about using nuclear power to desalinate seawater instead? Saves you the trouble of having to build a ship around your nuclear power plant....
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Okay, three things: if you want to use nuclear power to tow icebergs, how about using nuclear power to desalinate seawater instead? Saves you the trouble of having to build a ship around your nuclear power plant....
They used to have one "in the neighborhood"...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-350_reactor
Mono Lake (Score:5, Informative)
The same thing is happening to Mono Lake in California. The city of Los Angeles has been diverting the streams that feed the lake for decades and it's slowly drying up.
Salton Sea (Score:2)
Actually, there are many of these bodies of water around (prehistoric endorheic basins including the Caspian Sea and the Great Salt Lake). But I think the Aral sea situation is more akin to the Salton Sea... The Salton and the Aral sea are that have recently had their replenishing flows restricted by agriculture.
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According to wikipedia, It was formed by an accident in 1905 which overflowed the canals carrying Colorado River water to California, so THERE ARE NO NATURAL replenishing flows for the Salton sea because it is NOT NATURAL.
The Salton Sea is an example of Man's impact on nature. Once was a vast stretch of desert, now is a fetid lake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Even the Wikipedia asserts that the basin where the Salton sea wasn't some prehistoric stretch of desert that we somehow man has converted to a lake, it has been the location of a lake on-and off (every 100K years or so), for the last million or so years... For example, Lake Cahuilla [wikipedia.org]
Like nearly all endorheic basins, in prehistoric times, the Salton basin was periodically filled by water from rain. It is generally thought that in pre-historical times, the Salton basin took water from the Alamo and Nuevo ri
Owens Lake (Score:1)
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Actually Mono Lake has been protected and its water level is currently going up.
Mediterranean is gonna dry up also (Score:2)
Not too long ago some tectonic events raised the land under Gibraltar and the Med was cut off from the Atlantic. Turns out, the freshwater flows from rivers into the Med is nowhere near enough to sustain its current size. Without a water connection to the Atlantic, the Mediterranean Sea dried up.
It can happen again at any time. The Mediterranean's existence is always in danger.
(and no, carbon emissions and AGW had nothing to do with it)
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Not on our watch.
While the technology exists to cut the Gibraltar channel deeper as needed it will get done. So long as there are still people to hold the shovels it will get done.
Cotton is a big culprit (Score:2)
Cotton is an extremely water-intensive crop. Until quite recently it was pushed on developing economies as an "export crop" for industrialized agriculture, replacing local food prodcution. This has generally been a disaster. For water-poor countries, growing cotton for export amounts to exporting expensive water to water-rich countires.
Diverting water for agriculture simply makes no sense. It is cheaper and more efficient to import the end product.
Too many other lakes... (Score:1)
This is happening to too many lakes around the world. I visited Brazil this past August, and while visiting family, someone wanted to show me something.
We got in the car and drove to a lake/reservoir, one of the largest in Brazil (Represa de Furnas). I had been there before, and knew what it was supposed to look like. We arrived, and drove out past the normal shoreline, and onward about a half mile before we reached the lake's current extent.
It's truly shocking in person - and to start putting this together
Too many other lakes... (Score:1)
On the bright side... (Score:2)
Burning Man Uzbekistan 2015!
Build your camp in one of our rusting ship hulks laying on the playa!
simple solution (Score:2)
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If you think about it, The Great Salt Lake is staring at the same issue (albeit on a longer timescale).
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"No, mommy, I'm looking at -flip flip flip- the Aral Sea."
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No mom, I am looking at those little cute birds...
FTFY (Score:2)
"Are you looking at saggy tribal titties again, Anon?"
"No, mommy, I'm looking at -fap fap fap- the Aral Sea."
Of course that only lasted until I discovered you could subscribe your parents to magazines without them knowing and the Victoria Secrets started showing up.
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Changing rainfall patterns, climate variability, high levels of evaporation, reduced snow melt runoff, and current water use patterns are putting pressure on water management resources at Lake Mead as the population relying on it for water and the Hoover Dam for electricity continues to increase. A 2008 paper in Water Resources Research states that at current usage allocation and projected climate trends, there is a 50% chance that live storage in lakes Mead and Powell will be gone by 2021, and that the reservoir could drop below minimum power pool elevation of 1,050 feet (320 m) as early as 2017. Although water levels in the lake rose by more than 30 ft (9.1 m) in 2011 due to a rainy winter and increased snowfall in the Rocky Mountains,[15] it appears highly unlikely that the prevailing pattern of drought will change to precipitation surcharge in a time frame shorter than that in which the lake level will fall below the dead storage level of the downstream diversion and hydro-power intake tunnels.
There's worse, if you google "lake mead drying up."
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And NASA have been taking satellite images of it since a bit before 2000 too. E.g. 1977 [unep.net]
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The number of comments just proves that number of people who read about this in mainstream media several days ago when it was trending on Facebook but who had to wait for Slashdot to catch up to the trend before they could say anything about it that someone else might read.
The fact that it is trending on Facebook this week proves something else, which is that most people think the Aral Sea is a big circle as shown on most world maps and globes and had no idea that the Soviets had diverted its main sources,