Sorry...ARAL madness.
Aral madness
Caroline Williams's article on the Aral Sea missed out one of its possible
fates back in the 1980s - a bad idea that got quite a long way (4 January,
p 34). This was to reverse the flow of one or more of the great
north-flowing rivers, using nuclear explosions to blast new channels for
them. The effects on the Kara Sea, and therefore on the Arctic Ocean, which
is where a lot of our weather is made, could have been disastrous.
The idea was to allow the overuse of water for irrigation in the southern
republics to continue. Williams is right about the bad construction of the
canals, which are neither lined nor covered, and the water lost from them
amounted to just about what they hoped to get from the reversed rivers.
Even now, odd things are still happening to the much larger Caspian Sea.
Elizabeth Young
London, UK
http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opletters.jsp?id=ns237914
