The Aral Sea Is COMING BACK, and Its Mystery Is Stunning Everyone

The Aral Sea, once one of the largest lakes on Earth, dried up almost completely within a single human lifetime, and yet its northern half has come back to life. This video explains how Soviet cotton irrigation drained the Aral, what its exposed seabed hid, and how a thirteen-kilometer dam in Kazakhstan brought the North Aral and its fish back from the dead. 0:00 A Sea Back From the Dead 1:29 Bioweapons Island and a Sunken Tomb 4:40 How the Aral Sea Collapsed 6:45 Who Drained It: Cotton and Canals 9:20 Poison Dust Storms From the Seabed 12:13 Stranded Ships and Dead Ports 14:25 The 13-Kilometer Dam That Worked 16:22 The Fish Came Back Alone 18:26 The Wall That Doomed the South 20:53 Can Other Dying Lakes Recover? Along the way it separates documented facts from rumors and travelers' tales, and asks whether the northern miracle can be repeated on other vanishing lakes. The story ends where it began, with a fisherman rowing onto a sea the world had already crossed off the maps. What this video covers: The Soviet biological-weapons site on Vozrozhdeniya (Rebirth) Island, code-named Aralsk-7, and the medieval Kerderi mausoleum and Aral-Asar settlement found on the dried seabed. How the Aral in 1960 covered about 68,000 square kilometers, fed by the Amu Darya (the ancient Oxus) and the Syr Darya, before losing more than 90 percent of its volume. The diversion of both rivers for cotton, the Soviet "white gold," through unlined canals like the 1,500-kilometer Karakum Canal. The toxic Aralkum salt desert and dust storms that carry pesticides thousands of kilometers, and the health crisis in Karakalpakstan. The collapse of the fishing towns Aralsk and Muynak, the ships left to rust, and fisherman Sagnai Zhurimbetov. The World Bank-funded Kokaral Dam, finished in 2005, which raised the North Aral far faster than engineers predicted. How salinity fell and freshwater fish returned on their own down the Syr Darya, with no restocking. Why the same dam left the hypersaline Big Aral in the south to die. Comparisons with Lake Urmia, Tulare Lake, Lake Chad, and the Caspian, plus the shelved Soviet plan to divert the Ob and Irtysh rivers. Mentioned in this video: Aral Sea, North Aral, Big Aral, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Amu Darya, Oxus, Syr Darya, Vozrozhdeniya Island, Aralsk-7, Kantubek, anthrax, plague, tularemia, smallpox, Kerderi mausoleum, Aral-Asar, Golden Horde, Krivonogov, Karakum Canal, cotton, white gold, Soviet Union, FAO, Aralkum, TROPOS, Free University of Berlin, National Geographic Society, Altai, Tien Shan, Caucasus, Karakalpakstan, Doctors Without Borders, Aralsk, Muynak, Sagnai Zhurimbetov, Kokaral Dam, Berg Strait, World Bank, Masood Ahmad, Columbia University, Christopher White, KIMEP University, BBC, Pulitzer Center, Vadim Sokolov, International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea, Artemia brine shrimp, Lake Urmia, the Artemis, Iran, Tulare Lake, California, Lake Chad, Caspian Sea, Ob, Irtysh, NASA.