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From ecological Soviet-era ruin, a sea is reborn
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-10-26 10:48

The drying-out has severely damaged plant and animal life and created huge salt and dust storms that can travel 500 kilometers (300 miles), Micklin said in an e-mail interview.

The payoff was a bonanza of cotton to supply the Soviet market as well as Cuba and the communist countries of Europe. The fishermen paid the price. By the mid-1970s, Aral catches were down by about three-quarters from the roughly 40,000 tons before the drying. Eventually fishing on an industrial level ceased altogether.

As dead freshwater fish washed ashore, desperate Soviet authorities introduced the salt-resistant flounder, a squat bottom-feeder, to save the local fishing industry.

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Now it's the flounders that are dying in the returning waters, while Prikeyev is selling his catch in Russia, Ukraine and Georgia and has his eye on wealthy western European consumers.

"The western Europeans like the pike because it is so lean," Prikeyev said, as he waited for returning fishermen near the village of Akespe.

"We Kazakhs need fat ones, like that one," he laughed, pointing at a freshly caught carp shimmering on the beach.

"My dream is to improve things for the fishermen, so that they can live and work a little more easily," Prikeyev said.

Local fishing cooperatives have received $2 million in Japanese aid to house the fishermen in mobile homes with electricity and phone lines, Prikeyev said.

The fish have to be driven by jeep on a bumpy half-hour ride across a blinding white expanse to be loaded onto refrigerator vans. But Prikeyev hopes to eliminate those daily trips by building a $25,000 walk-in refrigerator in a nearby village.

On the northern side of the Kokaral dike, migratory birds and seagulls circle over the waters, screeching and scanning for prey. A few carp slide over the brim of the dam. All will die in one of the isolated pockets of the southern sea.

Between the Aral's old coastline and the current one, a new ecosystem has taken root. Salt-encrusted seabed has become scrubland full of gophers, lizards, spiders, warthogs and roaming herds of camels.

The fleet of stranded boats, hulls rusting, wheelhouses cobwebbed, is thinning out, plundered by scrap metal dealers.

And hope is returning with the waters. Alexander Danchenko, a retired shipyard worker, feels it in the weather.

"When there was no sea, it felt like we were in a frying pan here in the middle of the desert," he said. "Now it's returning, sometimes you can feel a pleasant, cool breeze coming in from the south."

At Aralsk's port, disused cranes loom over open space strewn with garbage. Murat Sydykov, 70, a musician who lives in the city, says his mournful music is inspired by the fate of the sea, but he is optimistic it will one day play a happy tune again.

"When the sea returns to Aralsk," he said, "I will write a symphony and get an orchestra to play it by the shore."

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