A vanished sea reclaims its form in Central Asia

By Ilan Greenberg The New York Times

FRIDAY, APRIL 7, 2006
KARATEREN, Kazakhstan In the blue night haze, Gamin Zhaisanbayev and several dozen other men haul heavy gear into their trucks as boys sitting on stoops quietly watch their silhouettes. Zhaisanbayev and his neighbors are preparing for a job not undertaken in this dusty village for more than a generation: They are going fishing.

In dozens of villages like Karateren, frigid green water now laps against long-abandoned harbors and fishing vessels hastily retrieved from open air desert graves have been put back to sea.

The Aral Sea, having been drained of 75 percent of its water volume, has this year taken on millions of cubic feet of new water years ahead of schedule, surpassing even the sunniest predictions made when a new dam was completed last summer. The additional water has overwhelmed many of the yellow- stained grass islands that had dotted the Aral's shrinking coastline, and with each month the water pushes back the desert just a little more.

The sea's 400-square-kilometer, or 155-square-mile, retreat from its original shoreline is frequently invoked as one of the 20th century's more jaw- dropping ecological catastrophes, a consequence of the Soviet-era policy of diverting the Aral's two main tributary rivers into canals to irrigate millions of cotton plants across Central Asia. Without water, the sea became a mineral stew that unleashed disease and poverty onto the hundreds of villages and cities in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that once lived off its bounty. The sea even split into two, creating the small Aral and the large Aral.

About a million people live along Kazakhstan's Aral Sea coastal plain. Hoping to save the small northern Aral, the World Bank and the Kazakhstan government commissioned the Kok-Aral Dam, completed last summer, and a series of dikes designed to create spillways to allow the flushing of excess salt from the sea while improving overall water levels. A sluice built on top of the dam sends excess water to the parched big Aral Sea, which is largely within neighboring Uzbekistan.

The entire project will entail the repair of an existing second dam; the digging of a channel to connect the northern and southern Arals; and additional water management structures, some able to harvest hydroelectric power from the water flows.

The $85.8 million project, started in 2001, is on track to be completed in September. But it has already shown surprising results. The Kok-Aral Dam has caused the small Aral's level to swiftly rise to 38 meters, or 125 feet, from a low of less than 30 meters; 42 meters is considered the level of viability. Although World Bank water experts had forecast that the water levels would begin to rise only in three years or so - while other experts had put the Aral beyond any hope of reclamation - the small Aral's surface area has already expanded by 30 percent, bloated by about 10 million cubic meters of new water.

Which is how Zhaisanbayev and his neighbors were able to begin fishing. This year, Zhaisanbayev built a home, one of 15 new houses in the village.

The Aral was once the fourth-largest lake in the world, a rich resource not just for nearby residents but a major provider of fish for the entire Soviet Union until the sea's decline in the 1960s.

In Zhaisanbayev's father's day, the fish lived just outside his front door, where the Aral Sea met coastline. But Zhaisanbayev's father, a fishing boat captain, died a long time ago, and now, most days, Zhaisanbayev, 38, climbs into his truck parked at the edge of this grim village of scattered shacks and stray dogs and drives 32 kilometers through an infecund desert of gray sand and colorless prickly weeds to reach the water's edge.

Previously, Zhaisanbayev worked at a fish processing plant. But that plant closed in 2001, and to support his three young children he took a job at a social club in a larger town.

"When the sea came back I knew I must fish," Zhaisanbayev said. "It is what we wait for." He said on a good day now, fishing for carp and flounder he can come home with 10,000 tenge, or about $85, in his pocket, an astronomical profit in a region where many people survive on little more than a few dollars a day. "The sea is the main thing," he said, brown eyes gleaming.

Having received unexpected visitors, Zhaisanbayev unfurled long, handwoven carpets across his large living room while his wife prepared piles of nuts, fruits, and cured meats in a kitchen sparkling with new, brand-name appliances imported from Korea.

With the disappearance of sea, fish and the ecologically interconnected freshwater lakes that supported livestock, the Aral region quickly lost population. Half of Karaterin's people had migrated to larger cities during the past two decades. Zhaisanbayev says many are now returning to the fishing fleets. Karaterin has no store and is hours away from any heavy industry, but its population has grown to 1,700 people from a low of less than half that two years ago. A new mosque is being built.

For many in the region, the return of the water is confirmation that the Aral's past is prologue. Kudaibergen Sarzhanov, a spry former Soviet minister of fisheries for Kazakhstan during the reign of Mikhail Gorbachev, plans a 2009 release of the 30,000 fish he has been incubating at home, financing his project from a small UN grant and funding from his local government.

Sarzhanov has spent his retirement collecting the almost extinct usech, a rubbery fish native to the Aral that can eventually grow to 18 kilograms, or 40 pounds. He is eager to release his hoard. "I live together with the fish," he said.

At the Komushbosh Fishing Hatchery, a modern fish incubator funded by a $143,000 grant from Israel, the plan is to release as many as 30 million young sturgeon, carp and flounder into the Aral and its many nearby lakes when water levels are at full level, double the number of fish scheduled for release in 2006.

In the Aral's heyday, 20 thousand tons of fish were harvested per year.

No one predicts the Aral can ever produce its original catches again, and some in the Kazakhstan government warn of a long road ahead.