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Explore a global timelapse of our planet, constructed from Landsat satellite imagery. With water diverted to irrigation, the inland Aral Sea has shrunk drama...
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Scooped by PIRatE Lab |
Scoop.it!
PIRatE Lab's insight:
The collapse of the Aral Sea ecosystem is one of the monumental environmental disasters of the last century. Soviet mismanagement, water-intensive cotton production and population growth have all contributed the overtaxing of water resources in the Aral Sea basin, which has resulted in the shrinking of the Aral Sea--it has lost more of the sea to an expanding desert than the territories of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg combined. The health problems arising from this issues are large for the entire Aral Sea basin, which encompasses 5 Central Asian countries and it has profoundly changed (for the worse) the local climates. Compare the differences with some historical images of the Aral Sea onGoogle Earth or on ArcGIS Online (also see this article from GeoCurrents).
The drying of the Aral Sea opens our eyes to how fragile our environment is and the scarcity of resources. We need to become more aware of our resources, because as they saying goes, the "well will run dry."
The massive changes to the Aral Sea can clearly be seen through the course of a decade. It's so unbelievable that from 2000 on ward it shrunk significantly and the video also showed the development of agricultural land that surrounds the rivers feeding into the Sea. The more water being irrigated and are not putting into the Sea the more it dries up because the water is evaporated with little to no rain going back to it. This is definitely one of the worst man-made disaster that have happened to this region.