STANDING on the promenade at Muynak in Uzbekistan, once one of the great seaside resorts of the Soviet Union, you don’t see crashing waves, or boats sailing into the harbour that once supplied fish from Riga to Vladivostok. All you see is sand stretching to the horizon and beyond.
Welcome to what’s left of the Aral Sea. Just 40 years ago this was the fourth-largest lake in the world, covering 68,000 square kilometres. Now almost all of it has gone, leaving 50,000 square kilometres of new, uncharted desert.
From Muynak, you can drive out a few kilometres to an “offshore” gas well. Along the way you pass dead trees left over from a failed attempt to afforest a piece of the desert floor. There is also a line of telegraph poles, minus the connecting cable, and a canal carrying a dribble of farm drainage water. This is the last remnant of the ancient Amu Darya river, which once carried more water than the Nile and was the sea’s main source of water. Now it simply trickles uselessly into the sand.
Advertisement
Until 1991, you could blame Soviet engineers. They turned the republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan into a giant cotton farm that sucked up 90 per cent of the river’s water. But nothing much changed when they went home. Today, the water is used to grow cotton for clothing sold in western shops.
Beyond where the road and the canal give out, there is nothing. On another continent there might be Bushmen, Aborigines or pioneer farmers who know every inch. Not here. Through binoculars I spotted a fox trotting through the scrub, but my vodka-swilling driver assured me that no people ever venture this way. Between us and the final, evaporating remains of the sea there was nothing but uncharted desert for 100 kilometres.
Afterwards I checked. Surely someone has been out here? I drew a blank with the Uzbek authorities, whose territory includes most of the former sea. They have deliberately turned their back on the place.
Satellites have snapped the new desert, of course. Much of it shows up brilliant white because of the huge salt deposits mixed with pesticides from the fields. A few foreigners have tried to drive across the seabed to confirm the satellite observations, says John Lamers, an agronomist at the University of Urgench in Uzbekistan, who keeps tabs on them. Most don’t get far. “The bed is not completely unexplored, but only a very tiny little part of it has been surveyed,” he says. The rest is terra incognita.
It cannot be long before someone decides that this new desert should be mapped and protected. It is, after all, unique.
