waiting for the tide to come in?
This photo was part of a series entitled "Jason Larkin's Mistake of Nature, published in the British Journal of Photography.
The accompanying info includes:
"Once the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, the Aral Sea shrank to just 10 percent of its original size after Soviet engineers redirected the two rivers that fed it, Amu Darya in the south and the Syr Darya in the north east, in the 1960s. Keen to promote cotton growing, the Soviets dismissed the sea as 'Nature's error', but Karakalpakstan has come to miss the Aral Ten'iz ('a sea which fled its shores').
"The seabed has turned into a desert, the fishing industry has collapsed, farmers' crops have withered, and the population is suffering from spiralling respiratory diseases, caused by sand and salt whipped up by wind. Karakalpakstan is also under continuous political siege by Uzbekistan, and these factors have ensured that much of the population has also fled its shores. Official figures put emigration to Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan at more than 50,000 over the past decade, roughly 10 percent of the population, but the real number is thought to be much higher."
The accompanying info includes:
"Once the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, the Aral Sea shrank to just 10 percent of its original size after Soviet engineers redirected the two rivers that fed it, Amu Darya in the south and the Syr Darya in the north east, in the 1960s. Keen to promote cotton growing, the Soviets dismissed the sea as 'Nature's error', but Karakalpakstan has come to miss the Aral Ten'iz ('a sea which fled its shores').
"The seabed has turned into a desert, the fishing industry has collapsed, farmers' crops have withered, and the population is suffering from spiralling respiratory diseases, caused by sand and salt whipped up by wind. Karakalpakstan is also under continuous political siege by Uzbekistan, and these factors have ensured that much of the population has also fled its shores. Official figures put emigration to Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan at more than 50,000 over the past decade, roughly 10 percent of the population, but the real number is thought to be much higher."
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