Assuming political will and allocated budget, would a joint Russian-Kazakh-Uzbek-Kyrgyz project to restore the Aral sea work?
Redirecting Oxus back to it would destroy Kyrgyz agriculture, but would redirecting the Irtysh and Ob from their drainage basins do more harm than good?
What about desalinating water from the black sea with nuclear power and having it flow in reverse into the basin to irrigate and green the entire region?
You underestimate the amount of water required
Desalination is uneconomical just to supply a few million humans, filling the Aral takes magnitudes more water, plus you will make a closed lake unless you have constant upkeep
The area is already a drainage basin, redirecting a river from a less ecologically and economically important area is a lot simpler
But making more fresh water for everyone is insanely based, and doing it with free energy is even more so.
>Assuming political will and allocated budget
Implies a degree of realism
If the israelites can do it so can the Russkis. The lithium production from the brine alone would be worth a fortune.
Why? The cotton fields of Uzbekistan are more important than a dumb desert lake. Import canned tuna if you want fish.
>ahem, FUCK THE ARAL SEA
It's a pointless political question, filling a lake is obviously just going to work scientifically speaking. Whether that does more harm than good is up for the politicians to decide but in the spirit of science we can further assume that it in fact does what ever you are baiting this thread for.
Import ice from the Kuiper belt and impact it as gently as possible in the Aral Sea area.
Major terraforming projects of this type generally can't be solved with in-situ resources.
I seriously doubt it can be restored at this point since desertification has already set in and you would lose most of the water you pour in. River diversions are pure cope at this point. Climate is far more local than global, by irrigating en masse they insured too high evaporation surface areas without a plan to lower windspeeds and recapture water precipitation in their drainage basin, so they lost most of the water in the area. It was not the irrigation itself that's the problem (see Northern USA, Canada, Germany for how this can be done successfully), it's the poor water management, poor crop management and monoculture fields.
What they could do (timeline of centuries, not decades):
>Improve depth/area of every single shoddy canal the commies built
>Identify largest volume acquifiers in the North-East of the irrigated region.
>Increase forests in that area (as was cultivated in the Western steppe, this can be done as long as they don't use conifer or pure for-profit monocultures).
>From this stable eco-system, use the increased rainfall to expand the forests slowly over time in a West-South-West direction interdispersing wild woodland with for-profit monoculture agricultural areas and forests.
>
This could be done, it won't. They will listen to the first reductionist idiot that tells them they are able to continue making a short term profit. They will end up with a MENA tier desert.
The original Soviet plan is still the way to go.
There is nothing unusual about how the rivers are managed, the only unusual part is that they used to drain into a lake.
Didn't the soil turn toxic for some reason? I doubt pouring water over it is gonna help much now.
-Improve the quality of irrigation canals.
-Use alternative cotton species that require less water.
-Promote non-agricultural economic development in upstream countries.
-Using fewer chemicals on the cotton.
-Cultivate crops other than cotton.
-Redirect water from the Volga, Ob and Irtysh rivers to restore the Aral Sea to its former size in 20–30 years at a cost of US$30–50 billion.
-Pump sea water into the Aral Sea from the Caspian Sea via a pipeline, and diluting it with fresh water from local catchment areas.
No as the money would go into floating golden dachas everywhere else but the aral sea
No. The water is being used for agriculture. Filling the lake is easy, just pour the water in faster than it evaporates but there's no point to do that.
>Israel
Israel has also destroyed most of the dead sea, they decided to limit how water they take from the Jordan river because they dont want to fully dry it because of sentimental reasons. Restoring the aral sea is also a sentimental thing but cotton is more important.
I suppose it's optimal to use the water upstream when needed.
>dead sea
There have been talks about refilling using water from the Mediterranian Sea, with proper filtering. Increasing the lake area will incrase evaporation, perhaps cause some rainfall in that area.
>perhaps cause some rainfall in that area.
This fucking intrusive virus again. Go pour a bucket of water in your front yard, wait for it to rain over your house only
israelites already have more water than they need
The Aral Sea has an area of 68.000 km^2. Assuming an average depth of 20 m this yields a volume of 1360 km^3.
An average ejaculation has a volume of 2 mL. Assuming each of the 4 billion men on earth can ejaculate 5 times a day, it would thus only take 93.150 years to fill the Aral Sea (not taking into account leap years).
I think this is a reasonable time scale. We should start right now.
>NOOOOOOOOOOO
>people can't just use readily available water, water needs to be saved for bugs and fish
>i am the savior of the aral sea
>i am the messiah of the birds and the fish
>i am the protector of mother nature
>i own the whole planet, everyone has to do as i say
>people shouldn't be allowed to use water
>i hate humans, i only like bugs and fish and virtue signalling on social media platforms
if you hate humans then you should kys
gtfo muh planet, you are the other humans are ruining it