Irrigation Begins to Drain the Aral Sea

In 1960, the Aral Sea spanned roughly 68,000 square kilometres across Central Asia, ranking as one of the largest inland bodies of water in the world. Straddling modern Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, this endorheic basin relied on two major lifelines: the Amu Darya flowing from the south and the Syr Darya from the east. In the early 1960s, Soviet economic planners launched an aggressive campaign to transform the surrounding arid plains into extensive fields of cotton, known within the state apparatus as white gold, alongside crops of rice, melons, and cereals. Achieving these production targets required diverting massive volumes of water directly from both feeder rivers into sprawling network canals.

The engineering of this regional irrigation infrastructure was fraught with inefficiency. Large-scale diversion for irrigation had begun by the late 1930s and expanded rapidly during the 1960s. The Qaraqum Canal, the largest irrigation canal in the Soviet Union, alone diverted 225 cubic kilometres from the Amu Darya between 1956 and 1986, none of which returned to the Aral. By 1960, between 20 and 60 cubic kilometres of freshwater were being redirected each year into agricultural fields rather than reaching the lake basin. Soviet hydrologists and planners recognized the environmental trade-off; during planning in the 1950s and 1960s, experts predicted that expanded irrigation would substantially shrink the sea and judged the cost worth paying.