The Half They Chose to Save
In August 2005 Kazakhstan finished an earth dam across the strait that once joined the two halves of the Aral Sea, and the northern half began to come back within months. It works because it keeps everything the Syr Darya delivers on one side of it, which is also the reason the southern half is not coming back at all.
Aralsk was a fishing port. The railway station has a mosaic on it commemorating 1921, when the fishermen here answered an appeal from Lenin during the Volga famine and sent fourteen wagons of fish north to feed people who were starving. The harbour that loaded those wagons is now dry ground with weeds in it, and the water is somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five kilometres away depending on the year you ask. That is an improvement. In the 1990s it was a hundred.
The Aral Sea covered roughly 68,000 square kilometres in 1960 and was the fourth-largest lake on earth. It was fed by two rivers, the Amu Darya from the south and the Syr Darya from the east, and from the 1960s onward Soviet irrigation planning took most of both for cotton and rice. By the late 1980s the sea had fallen far enough to split in two at the Berg Strait: a small northern basin inside Kazakhstan fed by the Syr Darya, and a very much larger southern one inside Uzbekistan fed, in principle, by the Amu Darya. Two seas, two rivers, two countries, and only one of the four combinations still had water arriving in it.
The dyke the fishermen built
The idea of closing the strait is older than any international project. If the Syr Darya's water could be stopped from running out of the northern basin into the southern one, the north would fill to whatever the river could sustain. Local authorities and villagers built a sand barrier across the strait in the early 1990s and rebuilt it after it failed. It failed again. There was no money to armour it, and a sand dyke is destroyed precisely when it starts to succeed: the water rises behind it, finds the weakest section, and takes the whole thing out in a night. Two went that way: the sand dike of 1992, and the sturdier one built on the same line in 1996, which had no spillway and which the spring rise breached in April 1999, killing two men on it and stranding twenty-seven more to be lifted off by boat and helicopter. That second failure made the case that a temporary structure could not be the answer.
The loan
The Syr Darya Control and Northern Aral Sea Project, phase one, was agreed with the World Bank in June 2001. It cost close to $86 million, of which $64.5 million was a Bank loan and the rest came from the Kazakh government. Most of the money did not go into the dam. It went into the river — regulating structures and channel works along the lower Syr Darya, which had been flooding in winter because the reservoirs upstream in Kyrgyzstan release water in the cold months to generate electricity rather than in the summer when the fields want it. Fix the delivery, then build the thing that holds what is delivered. The Kokaral dam was completed in August 2005: about thirteen kilometres of embankment across the strait, with a concrete spillway that caps the northern basin at 42 metres. Within months the level had climbed from under 30 metres above sea level to 38, years ahead of the projection; two decades on it stands at about 40.4, still short of the ceiling the spillway allows.
The dam is not a wall against the desert. It is a decision about where the last of the river is permitted to stop, and the answer is: north of here.
What came back
Average salinity fell from around 30 grams per litre to about 8. In the worst years the only fish that could live in the northern basin was flounder, a marine species stocked deliberately in the 1980s because it tolerated brine; once the water freshened, close to two dozen species came back down the Syr Darya on their own — bream, roach, asp, pike-perch, carp. The catch tells the story more plainly than the chemistry does. In 2006 the northern basin yielded about 1,360 tonnes, most of it flounder. By 2016 it was 7,106 tonnes, and bream rather than flounder was the commonest fish in it. Processing plants reopened in Aralsk. Villages that had been emptying refilled, slowly and partially, and a fisherman in Karateren now works water that his father watched leave.
The other half
The southern basin got nothing, and was never going to. It depends on the Amu Darya, which in most years is consumed entirely by irrigation in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan before it reaches the delta, and the Kokaral spillway only discharges southward when the north is above its ceiling — water that runs down a dry bed and evaporates. In August 2014 the eastern lobe of the South Aral was recorded completely dry for the first time in modern history. What is there instead is the Aralkum, tens of thousands of square kilometres of exposed seabed loaded with salt and with the residue of half a century of agricultural chemistry, which the wind lifts and deposits on farmland and lungs across the region. Uzbekistan's response has not been to refill it. It has been to plant saxaul across more than a million hectares of the bed to hold the dust down, which is a serious and expensive undertaking and also an admission about what is no longer being attempted.
Phase two, and what the dam decides
Kazakhstan has spent twenty years arguing about whether to go higher. The obvious next step is to raise the structure and bring the shoreline back to Aralsk itself, and the obvious objection is that the present dam cannot hold a higher head and the river may not be able to fill it. What has been agreed is a compromise: a second phase, prepared with the World Bank, that reconstructs the Kokaral dam and lifts the target level to 44 metres on the Baltic datum, with works scheduled across 2026 to 2029 and a projected surface of about 3,900 square kilometres. The refill is expected to take four or five years after that. Nobody involved is promising the water will reach the old harbour.
Stand on the crest at Kokaral and the whole policy is legible in one structure. On the north side there is a sea with fish in it. On the south side there is a channel going nowhere, and beyond it a desert with a Latin and Cyrillic name and no coastline. The dam did not create water; it allocated it. A country with the mouth of one river decided to keep what that river still carries rather than share it downstream with a basin two governments had already given up on, and the reward was a fishery, a shoreline and a set of villages that exist again. The cost was writing off the other half in concrete, which is a far clearer decision than the one that emptied the sea in the first place, and considerably harder to argue with.