Volume 11, Issue 3, June 2015, Pages 633–643
Anshumali Shukla1
1 POST GRADUATE TEACHER – GEOGRAPHY, ARMY PUBLIC SCHOOL, BEAS, PUNJAB, India
Original language: English
Copyright © 2015 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Aral Sea is a huge terminal lake which is located in the desert of Central Asia. This lake has repeatedly filled and dried due to both natural and human causes over the past 10 millennia. Today, its rapid desiccation or drying out is one of the planet's most serious ecosystem catastrophes. The main cause of the rapid drying out of this lake is the careless and massive withdrawal of water from two of its main feeding rivers namely Amu Darya and Syr Darya. The process of irrigation alone consumes 94% of all consumptive uses and is situated over 8.5million hectares of land across the Aral basin. In the first decade of 21st century, a very small and shallow portion of it is survived which is still under the threat of further drying out. This rapid drying out and destruction of the Aral Sea has led to a number of socio-economic, climatic and health related problems. There is a little hope in the near future to fully restore the Aral Sea. In the present paper, an attempt has been made to study the causes behind this ecological destruction, its negative impacts and strategies to restore it.
Author Keywords: Huge, Desiccation, Withdrawal, Shallow, Restore.
Anshumali Shukla1
1 POST GRADUATE TEACHER – GEOGRAPHY, ARMY PUBLIC SCHOOL, BEAS, PUNJAB, India
Original language: English
Copyright © 2015 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Aral Sea is a huge terminal lake which is located in the desert of Central Asia. This lake has repeatedly filled and dried due to both natural and human causes over the past 10 millennia. Today, its rapid desiccation or drying out is one of the planet's most serious ecosystem catastrophes. The main cause of the rapid drying out of this lake is the careless and massive withdrawal of water from two of its main feeding rivers namely Amu Darya and Syr Darya. The process of irrigation alone consumes 94% of all consumptive uses and is situated over 8.5million hectares of land across the Aral basin. In the first decade of 21st century, a very small and shallow portion of it is survived which is still under the threat of further drying out. This rapid drying out and destruction of the Aral Sea has led to a number of socio-economic, climatic and health related problems. There is a little hope in the near future to fully restore the Aral Sea. In the present paper, an attempt has been made to study the causes behind this ecological destruction, its negative impacts and strategies to restore it.
Author Keywords: Huge, Desiccation, Withdrawal, Shallow, Restore.
How to Cite this Article
Anshumali Shukla, “THE SHRINKING OF ARAL SEA (A WORST ENVIORNMENTAL DISASTER),” International Journal of Innovation and Applied Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 633–643, June 2015.
