Uzbekistan
I have a question for you. Do you live in or have you ever been to Uzbekistan? If the answer is yes, then you probably already know what I’m going to talk about. What I say may be hard to believe but it’s true. If you go to the Uzbekistan desert. You will see some wrecked ships in the desert and tons of salt. How is that possible you ask? Well, this is the shocking part. You see, that desert was a sea. Yes, I know it sounds very hard to believe but it was a sea. That’s why so much salt was there. To understand how this happened. We need to look at the Soviet Union and the river connecting to the Aral Sea. The Soviet Union was a mix of 15 countries, one of them was Uzbekistan. Now there was also a river connected to the Aral Sea. So, what happened is that someone from the Soviet times decided to cut off the water supply coming from that river to the Aral Sea for human uses like agriculture. And this human intervention is what caused the Aral Sea to evaporate. Millions of liters of water evaporated. The sea evaporation was terrible. Millions of fish and coral died. There were 35 different species of fish discovered in the Aral Sea. Also, the animals and the birds that depended on fish for food died in massive numbers. Even horses were affected because there was little to no rain due to the sea evaporating. So now, there is very little greenery in Uzbekistan due to the many horses that died. Also, cows died as they were dependent on grass too. What used to be 7000 cubic meters of water is now in modern-day Uzbekistan just 70. And no other fish can live in it because the water is too salty and the oxygen levels are crazy low. And it doesn’t end there. The water evaporated leaving tons behind. And the winds picked it up and it affected more wildlife and people died. There also have been cases of cancer in surviving animals or humans! We probably won’t be able to help Uzbekistan but the important thing is to make sure that this doesn’t happen to any country again. So many lives are dependent on one sea! Countries must preserve their oceans so the same thing that happened to Uzbekistan does not happen to any other country again. This is a national disaster and you didn’t hear this from me only. The United Nations (UN) declared this as a national disaster. We all need to work together to ensure that this doesn’t happen to any other country and that no more lives are lost. This is going to be hard, but if nations work together to solve this problem, we might just save millions of innocent lives from death.
