Ecologist Maira Nurkisheva is driving over what was once the northern shore of the Aral Sea, a vast inland lake straddling the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Rusting abandoned ships dot the sandy seabed. Some have been scavenged for scrap metal; the others provide shade for irritable herds of Bactrian camels. There are few other signs of life. When we reach the nearby village of Birlistik, which used to overlook a bay on the sea, we see that its mud-walled huts now face an insecticide-laced desert, filled with tumbleweeds and toxic shrubs, that stretches as far as the eye can see. Yet the villagers all speak enthusiastically of the boget, or dam, that is part of the grand waterworks project for which Nurkisheva is a consultant. Fifteen-year-old Parxhat Kutmanbetov explains in Kazakh, and Nurkisheva translates: "I've never seen the sea. But now I am sure the sea is coming back."
If all goes as planned, within a few years the Aral Sea could creep back to within three miles of the village. Revival of the shrunken sea hinges on an $85 million renovation of Kazakhstan's dilapidated system of river canals, sluices, and channels, culminating in an eight-mile dam across the middle of the northern part of the sea. The effort, a collaboration between the World Bank and the oil-rich Kazakh government, aims to reverse the decades of desiccation that have shriveled one of the world's biggest inland bodies of water.
Four decades ago, the Aral Sea offered a constant supply of fish. Two dozen species thrived in its waters, including caviar-rich sturgeon, pike perch, and silver carp, known locally as fat tongue. The sea spread over more than 26,000 square miles, and ships could travel 250 miles from the northern port of Aralsk, in Kazakhstan, to the southern harbor of Muynak in Uzbekistan. But Soviet-sponsored irrigation projects, begun in the 1950s, diverted water from two rivers that fed the sea: the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. By the late '90s, the Aral Sea was known as the world's fastest-disappearing body of water. It had then shrunk by more than half and lost nearly three-fourths of its volume.
Now, after decades of grim losses, the news from the Aral Sea is good: Since the dam's completion last August, the smaller, northern part of the Aral Sea has swelled by 30 percent, flooding more than 300 square miles of parched, sun-bleached seabed.
