Watch our movie about the Aral Sea

On a parched plain in Kazakhstan stand the shells of six cargo ships. Emaciated cattle lie in their shade. Camels stroll past. Still visible on a bow is the name of Alexei Leonov, a Soviet astronaut. There is no water in sight – just mirages shimmering in the heat.

In the village of Zhambul, Satykul Ubaidulaev, an old fisherman, said the plain was once a bay in the Aral Sea. In 1978, as the sea dried up, the ships put into the bay for winter because they could no longer reach the port of Aralsk. They hoped spring would bring higher water. It never did. The Aral continued to shrivel. Its fish died. Windstorms whipped up toxic dust from the seabed. People were stricken by death, disease and poverty. They found tumours in their livestock’s livers. Mr Ubaidulaev left to work in a distant Soviet tractor factory.

But this tale of almost biblical disaster will end with a miracle. The sea is returning. Within a few years its waters should be washing around the stranded vessels, lapping against the sand dunes below Zhambul, and astonishing younger villagers for whom stories of the Aral’s cool blue waters and abundant fish are merely legends. “My joy will be boundless,” Mr Ubaidulaev exclaims. “I will be able to fish again, feed my family, breathe fresh air.”

His excitement is common around the northern shores of a sea that faced extinction before the completion, in 2005, of a dyke dividing the northern Aral from the larger southern part.

The northern Aral has since grown by 1,000 sq km. Its fish and fishermen are returning. The climate is improving. People are healthier. “Good News – The Sea is Coming Back”, proclaims a billboard outside Aralsk. For the first time in a generation people in that rundown port dare to believe that ships will once again sail into their dried-up harbour. “This project has shown it’s been possible to reverse one of the world’s worst man-made environment disasters and bring back to life a sea that almost everyone thought was beyond saving,” said Joop Stoutjesdijk, the World Bank water expert who helped to rescue the northern Aral from communism’s ultimate triumph over nature.

In the 1960s the Soviet Union diverted the two rivers that fed the Aral – the Syr Darya and Amu Darya – to irrigate millions of hectares of cotton in the deserts of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

Moscow knew that this would doom the world’s fourth-biggest inland water. A sea of 70,000 sq km – nearly the size of Ireland – gradually shrank to a quarter of its original size, leaving fishing villages 100km from the water. In 1990 it split in two. In 2003 the southern part subdivided into eastern and western basins. Experts predicted that it would disappear completely by 2020.

The Aral became heavily saline. Its 30 species of indigenous fish died. Its fishermen spurned the salt-water flounder, introduced in 1979, and moved away. The desiccated seabed was carpeted with a toxic sediment of salt laced with chemicals from the cotton fields, which duststorms then deposited over thousands of square miles. Drinking water was poisoned.

Even today, 29 per cent of local people suffer from respiratory illnesses, and 47 per cent of women of fertile age suffer from blood diseases such as anaemia. Rates of cancer, miscarriages, infant mortality, birth defects, tuberculosis, kidney and skin diseases have soared.

In 1992, freed from Moscow’s yoke, the people of the northern Aral took action. They dammed the channel flowing from their sea, which was still receiving some water from the Syr Darya, to the southern Aral, which was receiving practically none from the Amu Darya. That primitive barrier was washed away. A second was destroyed by a storm in 1996 – but only after proving that a dam could raise the level of the northern sea.

The World Bank teamed up with the Kazakh Government on an $86 million project to build a proper 13 km dyke at the foot of the northern Aral, and to increase the flow from the Syr Darya by strengthening its levees, straightening its banks and removing old Soviet bottlenecks. The dyke was expected to raise the northern sea from 38 to 42m in three years. It took just 18 months, and the northern sea swelled from 2,300 to 3,250 sq km.

To the south of the dyke a barren seabed stretches away as far as the eye can see. To the north, as a crimson sun rose over the horizon, The Times watched a boat glide over a vast expanse of silver water with a netful of carp and pike-perch flapping in the bottom. Birds swooped overhead. Horses stood drinking in the nearby shallows. “It’s wonderful,” exclaimed Abilkhan Sariyev, the 60-year-old boatman who monitors the dozen species of fish that have returned.

But Mr Stoutjesdijk’s work is not finished. The new dyke is high enough to refill only half of the northern Aral. The water still stops 8km short of Zhambul, and 30 short of Aralsk, where old cranes and dilapidated warehouses surround the empty harbour.

An old channel and abandoned dredger record the town's desperate efforts to chase the receding sea. A sign reads: “The sea disappeared, but its song has not left our hearts.” Wistful murals in the town hall and at our Soviet-era hotel depict a harbour full of blue water and fishing boats with seagulls wheeling overhead. “Even now I cry when I go to where the port was,” said Babacha Kozhaeva, 85, who worked 28 years as a cargo ship’s cook.

But Aralsk’s sadness is giving way to optimism. President Nazarbayev has personally pledged to bring the sea back to Aralsk, much as Kennedy promised to put men on the Moon. This will probably entail the construction of a second, 20km, dyke across another set of narrows farther up the northern Aral, and of a canal from the Syr Darya to raise the water above that dyke to 46m. A new channel would then carry the water the last 6km into Aralsk’s harbour.

This second phase is expected to start in 2009, but the first phase alone is revitalising Aralsk. Fishermen are returning. A large new fish processing plant is working at full capacity. A new fish hatchery will release 15 million fingerlings into the northern Aral this year, and reintroduce sturgeon this autumn. Another new factory is building fibreglass fishing boats. Aralsk processed 2,000 tonnes of fish last year – enough to export some to Georgia, Russia and Ukraine.

With clean drinking water now piped in from 120 km away, and fish back in their diet, people’s health has begun to improve. Even the climate is changing for the better. “It’s true. In April, May and June we now have rain,” exclaims Nazhmedin Musabaev, Aralsk’s jovial Mayor. There is more grass for livestock. Summers are a little cooler. Duststorms are fewer. Swans, duck and geese are returning. Satykul Ubaidulaev yearns to see his young daughter swimming in the sea. Babacha Kozhaeva will die happy if the water returns to Aralsk. The Mayor looks forward to drinking beer with visitors around a refilled harbour.

They will probably get their wishes, but there is no hope for the larger southern Aral. Even if the Amu Darya were fully restored it would take 25 years to refill, but that will not happen. Millions now depend on crops irrigated by the river, and the Uzbeks want to explore the dried-up seabed for oil.

Mr Stoutjesdijk, bringer of water, counselled sadly: “Forget about the whole sea.”

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