17-year-old Aysulu walks alongside the dried riverbed of the Amu Darya, close to her house in Nukus, Uzbekistan.
Claire Harbage/NPR
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Claire Harbage/NPR
17-year-old Aysulu walks alongside the dried riverbed of the Amu Darya, close to her house in Nukus, Uzbekistan.
Claire Harbage/NPR
In Central Asia, the arena’s youngest wilderness occupies a basin that when held an infinite saline lake. The Aral Sea. Up till the Sixties, the ocean spanned greater than 26 thousand sq. miles throughout two international locations. It supported thriving fishing communities alongside its shores. However then, within the identify of growth and building, a lot of the river water that fed the ocean used to be diverted for agriculture. Now the Aral Sea has all however disappeared, shriveled to about 10th of its unique dimension. The UN Surroundings Programme has known as the Aral Sea’s destruction quote “probably the most staggering failures of the 20 th century.” In this episode of The Sunday Tale, Above The Fray Fellow Valerie Kipnis takes us to the Aral Sea to take a look at to know what went flawed and whether or not anything else may also be accomplished to avoid wasting the little water that is left.
This episode used to be produced by way of Justine Yan and edited by way of Jenny Schmidt. It used to be engineered by way of Gilly Moon. We might love to listen to from you. Ship us an e mail at TheSundayStory@npr.org. Concentrate to Up First on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.