Restoring Dry and Salinized Seabeds in the Aral Sea

araL Sea

The shrinking Aral Sea has exposed 60,000 km2 of seabed, which is now a giant salt desert. The dust and salt that blow from it across the countryside are causing health problems for people living nearby. Dr. Liliya Dimeyeva has dedicated her career to creating green seabeds in the desiccated land, and has discovered an effective afforestation procedure of planting saplings in the severely degraded land.

The road was bumpy; the saplings Dimeyeva planted the first year were destroyed by frost. The following spring the saplings took root, and survival rates varied from 33 to 72 percent. This is no small feat on heavy and highly saline ground. The results of her methods are promising, but it is impossible to cover the entire dried up seabed with green plantations. Other strategies must be used, like planting protective forests to form windbreaks or creating “green spots,” which are a small ecological oasis of up to 5 hectares that would speed up the natural plant colonization of the dry seabed.

But Dimeyeva now has new challenges to resolve: how to preserve the saplings that survived, identifying the factors that have the greatest impact on their survival in the tough seabed conditions, and the further development of the ecosystem. Her studies are the first of their kind. She has long collaborated with Japanese scientists; they have conducted joint expeditions and created documentary films, and she has presented her work at scientific conferences and universities in Japan. Land degradation through salinization, following prolonged irrigation of land for food production, is a widespread and well-known problem. But land salinization due to the shrinking of a sea is not common, and her work has brought public attention to new challenges in combating desertification.