Travel to Aral Sea & Aralsk

Until the mid-20th century, the Aral Sea was the fourth-largest lake on Earth, covering 68,000 square kilometers between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan with a maximum depth of 40 meters. Its name, derived from Turkic and Mongolic languages, means Sea of Islands, a reference to the more than 1,100 islands that once dotted its waters. The Aral supported a robust fishing industry harvesting over 20 commercially valuable species, a shipping trade connecting the port of Aralsk to river ports as far as Tajikistan, and a Soviet naval flotilla that had operated since 1847 when imperial Russia first assembled warships on its shores. The surrounding region was home to millions of people whose livelihoods depended on the sea’s abundance.

In the 1960s, Soviet central planners diverted approximately 75 percent of the flow from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers to irrigate cotton, rice, and cereal fields across the arid Central Asian steppe. By 1988, the program had made Uzbekistan the world’s largest cotton exporter, but the cost was catastrophic. Poor-quality irrigation infrastructure meant that most diverted water evaporated or leaked before reaching crops. The sea began shrinking irreversibly. By the 2000s, it had lost over 90 percent of its original area and dropped 75 feet, splitting into four disconnected remnants: the North Aral Sea in Kazakhstan, the eastern and western basins of the much larger South Aral Sea, and a small intermediate lake. Former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, visiting in 2011, called it one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters.

Aralsk came into being with the arrival of the Tashkent–Orenburg railway in 1905 and rapidly developed into the principal fishing port on the northern Aral Sea. At its peak, the town’s fleet processed thousands of tons of fish annually, and the local industry famously answered Lenin’s cry for help by dispatching trainloads of catch to feed the hunger-stricken Soviet population after the revolution—an episode immortalized in a socialist-realist mosaic that still decorates the Aralsk train station. Parallel to Muynak at the sea’s southern end in Uzbekistan, Aralsk served as the northern anchor of an entire economic ecosystem built around the Aral’s abundance.

As the sea retreated, Aralsk’s waterfront infrastructure was left high and dry. The fishing fleet was abandoned, the canning factories shuttered, and the harbor cranes rusted in place as the shoreline retreated nearly 100 kilometers to the south. Independent research suggests the lake’s collapse triggered the displacement of between 100,000 and 700,000 people from the broader region by the 1990s. Those who remained faced rising unemployment, contaminated water supplies, and severe health impacts from toxic dust storms blowing off the exposed seabed. Life expectancy in the Kyzylorda region declined from 64 to 51 years. Today Aralsk’s population persists in a community largely supported by the restoration project’s economic ripple effects and, increasingly, by visitors who come to witness the aftermath.

Among the most chilling chapters of the Aral Sea’s history is Vozrozhdeniya Island, Russian for Rebirth, where the Soviet military operated a top-secret biological weapons testing facility from 1948. Code-named Aralsk-7, the laboratory sat at the center of the sea on an island that never appeared on Soviet maps, accessible only by military transport. The facility tested weaponized strains of anthrax, smallpox, plague, tularemia, brucellosis, and Venezuelan equine encephalitis in outdoor pens and aerosol chambers, supported by a garrison town of approximately 1,500 inhabitants complete with housing blocks, schools, shops, a sports stadium, and an airfield. Before its abandonment, the Soviets used the island as a dumping ground for their stockpiles of weaponized anthrax.

Accidents were inevitable. In 1971, an explosion released weaponized smallpox in a yellow cloud that drifted across the open water. A scientist on a research vessel crossing the sea was infected despite being vaccinated, and upon returning to Aralsk she unknowingly spread the disease to nine others, three of whom died. Fishermen were found dead on boats with no visible trauma. In 1976, massive fish kills occurred without explanation, and in 1988, half a million saiga antelope dropped dead within hours downwind of the island. As the Aral Sea retreated, Vozrozhdeniya became a peninsula by 2001 and then merged entirely with the mainland, raising international concerns about contamination spreading from the hastily abandoned facility into the surrounding desert.