Saturday, February 04, 2012

Ships of the desert


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6 comments:

Ratz said...

And I thought barnacles were bad.

Supercool said...

I wonder how the ships got there...

Gareth said...

Monique I would assume it's a dried up lake, canal or harbour.

Gareth said...

Actually I think by the look of the boats that would be the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan. In the 1960s the Soviet Union diverted the two rivers that feed the Aral Sea to irrigate land in Uzbekistan for cotton production. Being in a deset the Aral Sea has been drying up pretty rapidly ever since. It is now only 10% it's original size and salinity has increased from 1% to 10%. It is, in short, a massive environmental disaster.

Anonymous said...

I think Aral Sea as well. A monument to communist/human stupidity. I still have a number of maps showing the sea's original extent.

Lurker111

Gareth said...

It worries me that long after the fall of the Soviet Union the UN have done nothing about this. Sure it would be bad for the economy of Uzbekistan to simply restore the flow of the rivers. But if they could just restore say 20% of the of the flow the difference to the Aral basin would be enormous.