The story is well known. The gloomy fate of the Aral Sea was sealed at the beginning of the 20th century, when the most prestigious of Russian climatologists, Alexander Voeikov, defined it as a “useless evaporator.” However, it was not until the 1960s that this destiny began to crystallize before the incredulous eyes of the inhabitants of its shores. Most of the water from the two enormous rivers that fed the Aral Sea was diverted to meet the irrigation demand of the cotton crops that the Soviet Union promoted in Central Asia, which destroyed the delicate hydrological balance of the sea, which began to evaporate. It only took fifty years of agricultural exploitation to reduce it to 10% of its size. In less time than it took to depreciate a boat, the inhabitants of fishing towns in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan saw the fourth largest sea on the planet and its most important freshwater fishery disappear, leaving them in economic and human ruin. Within a few more years, the Aral had retreated so far and so quickly from its ports and shores that for generations born after the 1980s, fishing or swimming in the Aral Sea is only something that appears in the longings of the elderly. In just three generations the sea had disappeared.
