Refill the Aral Sea First: A Life Spent Watching Water Disappear and Water Rise

I have stood on the dry floor of the Aral Sea, and I can tell you that no photograph prepares you for it. It is not a desert in the way the Sahara is a desert, ancient and self-consistent. It is a wound — a seabed still faintly shaped like the water that used to cover it, salt crusted white across the sand, rusting fishing trawlers stranded kilometres from any shore, and children playing in the hulls of boats their grandfathers once sailed to catch sturgeon. It is, without exaggeration, the worst environmental tragedy I have ever witnessed with my own eyes. And I have spent thirty years of my life witnessing tragedies of water, in one direction or the other.

The Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest inland body of water on Earth, spread across more than 68,000 square kilometres between what is now Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, fed for centuries by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. Soviet planners diverted those rivers at massive scale to irrigate cotton fields, and the sea began to die — slowly at first, then catastrophically. More than ninety percent of it is gone. What remains has splintered into four smaller lakes covering barely 3,500 square kilometres. The fishing economy that once fed the region collapsed entirely. The exposed seabed, laced with agricultural pesticide residue and salt, now rises on the wind as toxic dust that settles on crops and in human lungs hundreds of kilometres away. Villages that once sat on the water’s edge now sit stranded in a dead landscape, and the world, for the most part, has forgotten this happened at all. That forgetting is its own quiet tragedy.

I did not come to this subject as a tourist of disaster. I have spent three decades campaigning for the preservation of the Himalayan glacier system, including a sustained, and ultimately unsuccessful, effort to see the Siachen Glacier converted into a demilitarised peace park — a proposal grounded in a simple technical fact: Siachen is melting faster than almost any glacier on Earth, in significant part because of the sustained military presence stationed on its ice. I made the case, repeatedly, that removing that military footprint would slow a specific, measurable source of glacial loss, feeding directly into the Indus watershed that sustains hundreds of millions of people downstream. I did not succeed. The glacier continues to melt. The troops remain. I say this not as a complaint but as an honest accounting: I have given a large share of my working life to glacier preservation, and by the plainest measure — ice mass — I have not stopped the loss. That failure has not left me cynical. It has left me convinced that the scale of the response has to match the scale of the crisis, and that we have consistently chosen the smaller response.

I think about this every time I look at the Maldives. It is a nation of low coral islands, its highest natural point barely more than two metres above sea level, and it is not speaking in metaphor when its own government has warned that the country could become uninhabitable, and eventually vanish beneath the waves, within this century if sea-level rise is not slowed. I do not think most people outside the region understand how literally existential that threat is. This is not a country that will lose some coastline. This is a country that could, within the lifetime of children alive today, cease to have any land at all.

That is the other half of the water crisis I have spent my life watching, and it is the mirror image of the Aral. Where the Aral Sea disappeared because rivers were mismanaged and diverted without thought for the consequences, the oceans are rising because the atmosphere has absorbed decades of greenhouse gas emissions, and the ice sheets and glaciers that once held the planet’s frozen water in reserve are releasing it. Through most of the twentieth century, global sea levels rose at roughly 1.4 millimetres a year — barely perceptible within a human lifetime. Between 2006 and 2015, that rate had already accelerated to roughly 3.6 millimetres a year, and it continues to climb. A rise measured in inches sounds trivial until you understand what it does: it turns rare storm surges into routine flooding, drowns wetlands that once buffered coastal cities, backs up drainage systems and rivers, and makes what used to be called a hundred-year flood into a fixture of ordinary life. New York and Miami already experience “sunny-day flooding,” where nothing more than an unusually high tide sends seawater into city streets with no storm at all. Shanghai, Bangkok, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Dhaka — cities holding tens of millions of people and trillions of dollars of infrastructure — face the same mechanism at a scale that could displace populations larger than most countries.

And the danger does not arrive gently. In July 2025, an 8.8-magnitude earthquake off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula — among the ten strongest ever recorded — sent tsunami warnings racing across the Pacific, triggering evacuations from Russia to Japan to Hawaii to the western coast of the United States. It was, by fortune more than design, a disaster the world mostly escaped. Scientists have been explicit that higher baseline sea levels make the next such event, and the next cyclone, more destructive than the last one would have been at a lower starting point. We are not simply facing more disasters. We are facing the same disasters arriving on a stage that has been quietly raised beneath them.

I do not believe these two crises — a vanished inland sea and a rising global ocean — are separate stories. I believe they are the same failure, viewed from opposite ends of the same hydrological system: a civilisation that has never learned to treat the planet’s water as a single, finite, interconnected balance, to be managed with foresight rather than reordered by short-term convenience and corrected only after the damage is irreversible.

This is why I keep returning to an idea first studied seriously in the Khrushchev era and again in the 1980s: the Northern River Reversal Project, sometimes called Sibaral — a plan to channel a portion of Siberia’s great north-flowing rivers, the Ob and the Irtysh, southward into Central Asia to refill the Aral Sea, rather than letting that water empty, largely unused by human civilisation, into the Arctic Ocean. Soviet engineers studied this proposal in real technical detail for decades before it was shelved in 1986, a casualty of cost, changing political priorities, and, fairly, genuine ecological caution about interfering with major river systems at that scale.

I want to be honest about what refilling the Aral Sea would and would not do, because this proposal deserves scrutiny, not slogans. The volume of the Aral Sea, even restored, is a rounding error against the volume of the world’s oceans; no realistic regional project will, by itself, meaningfully slow global sea-level rise measured in the way scientists measure it. What refilling the Aral Sea would do, on the evidence of what the region looked like before its rivers were diverted, is stabilise a regional climate now defined by toxic dust storms and expanding desertification, revive an agricultural and fishing economy for millions of people, and reduce a source of extreme, localised weather instability across Central and South Asia — the same instability that has been implicated in the intensifying cloudburst and flash-flood events now battering South Asian cities each monsoon season. I raise the larger sea-level and glacier crisis in the same breath not because one project solves both, but because they areproof of the same principle: that engineering solutions matched to the actual scale of a water crisis were available decades ago, studied by serious scientists, and shelved instead of pursued. If even a thousand Albert Einsteins were assembled today to solve the question of what to do with Siberia’s north-flowing rivers, I do not believe they would arrive at a fundamentally different answer than the one Soviet engineers reached sixty years ago. The physics has not changed. Only our willingness to act on it has.

I am not naive about what this would require. Diverting rivers at this scale demands enormous capital, unprecedented cooperation between Russia and the Central Asian states, and rigorous, honest ecological review — including honest scrutiny of the very real risks critics have raised about disturbing major river systems. But I have spent thirty years watching what happens when the world chooses caution over action on water: the caution does not prevent damage, it only guarantees that the damage becomes irreversible before anyone commits to fixing it. The Aral Sea was once written off as unsalvageable. I hear the same fatalism now applied to Miami, to Dhaka, to the Maldives — that saving them may simply be beyond us. I do not accept that. I watched a sea disappear because we assumed nothing could be done. I am not willing to watch coastal civilisation disappear on the same assumption.

This is why I believe the moment now calls for decisive global leadership, not incremental adaptation. If President Trump is genuinely committed to protecting American coastlines from the billions of dollars in annual losses that cyclones and extreme rainfall already inflict, the fight against sea-level rise cannot be fought only on American shores — it has to begin, in part, in Central Asia, where the technical groundwork for one of the boldest water-balance interventions in modern history was laid decades ago and never finished. I would ask that in the next high-level talks between Washington and Moscow, with the United Nations Secretary-General at the table, the revival of the Aral Sea be placed on the agenda — not as a regional curiosity, but as a serious test case for the kind of bold, physically grounded engineering response that the rising seas, the strengthening cyclones, and the vanishing glaciers all now demand of us.

I have lived long enough to watch a sea vanish and an ocean rise, and I no longer believe these are separate warnings. They are the same warning, delivered twice, in case we missed it the first time. The Aral taught me that inaction is never neutral — it is simply a slower form of destruction. I would like my remaining years of work to be spent proving that lesson does not have to repeat itself on the coastlines the whole world is now watching rise.