{"id":230817,"date":"2025-10-21T21:07:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T21:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/230817\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T21:07:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T21:07:10","slug":"today-in-history-october-22-how-the-quest-for-white-gold-shrank-an-entire-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/230817\/","title":{"rendered":"Today in History – October 22: How the quest for ‘white gold’ shrank an entire sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

S\ufeffcientists on October 22, 1990, published stunning evidence about the shrinking of a huge inland sea, claiming it was an environmental catastrophe.<\/p>\n

The Aral Sea in Central Asia, once the fourth-largest area of fresh water in the world, had shrunk by two-thirds, experts from the UK Royal Geographical Society told the BBC.<\/p>\n

\ufeffShortly after the fall of the former Soviet Union, the society’s scientists were permitted to enter the area straddling modern-day Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/The once thriving Aral Sea region has been turned into a desert-like wasteland. (AP)<\/p>\n

What they found was stunning.<\/p>\n

The sea level had fallen in depth by more than 14 metres since the 1960s, endangering the lives of the four million inhabitants of the region.<\/p>\n

The region’s economy had been battered by the demise of a once-thriving fishing industry, while climate change ushered in longer colder winters and shorter, drier summers.\ufeff<\/p>\n

People living around the Aral Sea were suffering chemical poisoning, largely caused by the abandoned rusting hulks of ships on the dry seabed.<\/p>\n

The rate of infant mortality was worse than any other developing country, with 10 per cent of children dying in their first year.\ufeff<\/p>\n

\"\"\/A former fisherman sits on an abandoned trawler in the Aral Sea in Central Asia. (AP)<\/p>\n

\ufeffSalty, polluted drinking water caused levels of cancer and kidney disease to spike.<\/p>\n

For decades, the Aral \u2014 fed by rivers relying heavily on glacial melt, and intersecting the landlocked countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan \u2014 held metres-long fish, caught and shipped across the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

The region prospered, and thousands of migrants from across Asia and Europe moved to the Aral’s shores, for jobs popping up everywhere from canning factories to luxury vacation resorts.<\/p>\n

But in the 1920s, the Soviet government began to drain the sea for irrigation of cotton, known as “white gold” for its high value, and other cash crops.<\/p>\n

The move involved diverting water from the two main sources of the Aral Sea to new cotton fields, heavily dependent on regular water supply.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/The grave of a man who once lived near the Aral Sea in Central Asia in front of his abandoned house. (AP)<\/p>\n

\ufeffWhile the \ufeffnew cotton industry thrived, the human-made changes to the environment caused the Aral Sea to split by the late 1980s.<\/p>\n

The 1990 report by the British scientists triggered calls for international action to save the Aral Sea.<\/p>\n

The United Nations Development Program calls the destruction of the Aral Sea “the most staggering disaster of the 20th century”.<\/p>\n

In the decades since, climate change has worsened the environmental and health damage.<\/p>\n

Most seriously, doctors have found local people are suffering genetic damage.<\/p>\n

This means their children and grandchildren might be more susceptible to cancer as a result of the pesticide residues from the cotton fields.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"S\ufeffcientists on October 22, 1990, published stunning evidence about the shrinking of a huge inland sea, claiming it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":230818,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-230817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}