Once-great lakes

 Researching one of the answers for an online quiz, I came across this Web page, illustrating the great lakes of the world. Under the striking main infographic, there was another one reminding us of what was once one of the largest lakes - and the answer to many a quiz question - the Aral Sea. Thanks mainly to geo-engineering by the Soviet Union, but possibly aggravated by global warming, it has virtually dried up in my lifetime. It started with Lenin, when the fresh water which replenished the lake was diverted to the production of cotton, a notoriously thirsty crop, for the export trade. It continued under Stalin and has even survived the break-up of the USSR as the relict -stans grab what they can of the former feeder rivers.

It is a similar story with Lake Chad, though climate change and the advance of the Sahara play a larger part. 

There is more hope for the third lake mentioned in the illustrated Web page, Urmia in Iran, where, according to Forbes,

against the odds, one of the world’s largest salt lakes is now coming back to life, in a rare piece of good news from Iran. A combination of man-made efforts and higher rainfall in recent years is “slowly, but surely reviving what was once the second largest saltwater lake in the world,” says Claudio Providas, Resident Representative in Iran for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), which is involved in a project to save the lake.

Urmia had been laid low by a combination of drought, an ever-increasing number of dams (Iran has been an enthusiastic builder of them for more than 60 years) and the overuse of underground water sources and rivers by local farmers. The lake began retreating in the mid-2000s and by 2014 had shrunk to a fraction of its former size, with reports of it holding just 500 million cubic metres of water, compared to 30 billion cubic metres when it had been full.

The programme to save the lake began in 2013. At the time, Urmia’s surface covered just 500 square km, a fraction of the 5,000 km2 it had been at its height. By 2017, it had expanded to 2,300 km2 and, according to the latest information from the Lake Urmia monitoring station, it was at 3,134 km2 last month. The lake’s surface now lies 1,271.75 meters above sea-level, having risen by 0.3m over the past year and 1.7m since 2014. Iranian media agencies have been celebrating the progress with numerous reports in recent weeks. The authorities are understandably keen to advetise the gains that have been made, not least because so much else in the country has been going wrong in recent years, from protest movements brutally supressed to a stumbling economy hit hard by sanctions, tumbling oil prices and one of the world’s worst outbreaks of Covid-19. 

There is still a long way to go for the lake though. The target is to reach a water level of just over 1,274m, something which “still requires substantial efforts,” says Providas. But things are at least heading in the right direction. “Regarding the biodiversity of the lake, there are signs of hope,” adds Providas. He says that brine shrimp, which had disappeared from the lake’s ecosystem due to high salinity, are returning. The number of water birds such as flamingos has also increased from 4,000 during the worst period to 60,000 last year.

The fact that Iran controls Urmia and does not have to arbitrate between conflicting states is a positive factor. The future for Chad is less hopeful, though there may be hope in increased UN and other international concern for the region. Greed will almost certainly guarantee that Aral will not be restored.