Siberian river diversion proposal

Definition

Until the 1960s, the Aral Sea in Central Asia was the fifth-largest freshwater sea in the world. At 66,900 square kilometers, it was roughly the size of Belgium and the Netherlands combined. It had a major fishery, and seaside resorts were located on its shores in the Soviet Union. Irrigation from the sea’s main tributaries, the Amu Dar’ya and the smaller Syra Dar’ya, supported varied agriculture, including some cotton.

Then, the Soviets massively expanded cotton production. The desert of the Aral Sea Basin was the only Soviet region warm enough to grow cotton. The nation increased cotton production and suppressed other crops. It became the world’s greatest cotton producer for a number of years.

Cotton is a water-intensive crop, and the necessary irrigation infrastructure installed by the Soviets caused much water to evaporate away rather than flowing to the Aral Sea. Furthermore, inefficient irrigation methods leached salts from the soil to the surface. Farmers fought this salinization by annually “washing” their fields with more water. Finally, the Karakum Canal sent water to an area outside the Aral Sea Basin.

The result of all these factors in combination has been possibly the world’s worst ecological disaster. The Aral Sea shrank to three saline lakes with one-tenth the water it once held. Most of its dry seabed became a salty, pesticide-laced desert. Meanwhile, the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s left five independent countries in the basin: Kazakhstan, Krgystan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. Coordinating water policy became an international endeavor and was therefore much more difficult. The five countries have been too poor to be able to switch from cotton, and their decaying irrigation systems are even less efficient than they were in the Soviet days. One initiative has brought increased freshwater to a portion of the original Aral Sea, and this area is diked off from the saline areas. However, this program is only regenerating a small part of the original sea.

One desperate response to this disaster would be massive water diversion from major rivers that flow north into the Arctic Ocean. The Soviets designed such a project and began construction on it from 1976 until 1986, when cost and environmental concerns killed the project. However, the project was revived as a possibility in the early twenty-first century.

Significance for Climate Change

Critics of the Siberian rivers diversion scheme called it fixing one disaster with another. Dams would back up reservoirs, and pumps would take headwaters from these reservoirs into other basins. The Arctic river diversions would actually have started in European Russia, involving 19 cubic kilometers per year, mostly from the Pechora and Sakona Rivers. These waters would have been diverted to the Volga River for drainage to the Caspian. (The small eastward from the Volga would have allowed easy diversion to the Aral Basin.)

Diversion from the Ob and Irtysh Rivers, discharging roughly 385 cubic kilometers of water to the Arctic Ocean each year, might yield as much as 60 cubic kilometers. However, those waters would come at the cost of 3 gigawatts of pumping power to get over the 113-meter Turgay Divide from Western Siberia to the Aral Basin. Then, a 2,200-kilometer Siberal canal would need to be constructed to reach the Aral Sea.

The greatest complaint about these potential diversions has been that better irrigation practices would be more cost-effective. Water leakage from the Siberal canal would vastly increase the water demand from the rivers and the cost of the project. Most important for world climate, these diversions would decrease freshwater flow to the Arctic Ocean. This decrease would be important, because the Arctic is not temperature stratified as tropical and temperate ocean waters are. The Arctic Ocean is stratified. Warmer, saltier water flows northward from the in the Atlantic (which has become the Norwegian Current) and flows under the frozen freshwater at the surface. These salty waters are as much as 1° Celsius above freezing, while the surface waters are at freezing or below during winter. Moreover, saline water freezes at lower temperatures than does freshwater.

The Siberian river diversions could radically change the Arctic and, consequently, the world’s climate. If freshwater inflow were significantly decreased, as from the Aral Sea diversions, the Arctic pack ice might melt in the summer. This would probably contribute to global warming. However, open water could provide more evaporated water to generate snow that could cause global cooling. During the late 2010s, the Chinese government expressed interest in reviving the Siberian river diversion project. This idea was met with opposition by other world governments, which argued that the environmental concerns that originally stalled the project remained unchanged.

Bibliography

Ferguson, Rob. The Devil and the Disappearing Sea: Or, How I Tried to Stop the World’s Worst Ecological Catastrophe. Vancouver, B.C.: Raincoast Books, 2003.

Glantz, Michael J., ed. Creeping Environmental Problems and Sustainable Development in the Aral Sea Basin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Goble, Paul. "Moscow's Hopes to Use Water as 'New Oil' Outraging Siberians." The Jamestown Foundation, 23 Feb. 2021, jamestown.org/program/moscows-hopes-to-use-water-as-new-oil-outraging-siberians/. Accessed 21 Dec. 2024.

Pearce, Fred. When the Rivers Run Dry. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.

Salay, Jürgen. The Soviet Union River Diversion Project from Plan to Cancellation, 1976-1986.