Why Save the Aral Sea?
To spend somewhere between 25-50 billion dollars to refill the Aral Sea and turn the Aral Basin into a cornucopia of fishing, agriculture, forestry – a new example to the world of the old adage “water, wealth, contentment, health” – does seem like a bargain. And that’s about all it would cost to build two canals to drain water from the Volga and Ob rivers and move enough south to refill the Aral Sea in about 25-50 years. But maybe this international effort could yield additional benefits – saving the banks of the Caspian Sea from rising waters, and removing fresh water from the Arctic Ocean to preserve the gulf stream current? Now would it be worth 25-50 billion dollars? Each spring these days, the Arctic Ocean must adjust to larger than ever amounts of fresh water from the melting icecap. What if during this same period, some of the freshwater runoff from rivers were diverted south? It is especially Eurasia, with its massive Siberian watersheds, that contributes the most fresh water t
