Aral Sea

The Aral is a large, slightly salty lake in western Turkestan, lying between about 43 and 46 degrees north and 76 and 79 degrees east. In 1942 its area was 66,458 sq km, of which 2,345 sq km were islands. The largest islands are Tokmak Ata at the mouth of the Amu Darya, Ostrov Vozrozhdeniya (formerly Nicholas Island, discovered in 1848), Barsa Kelmez and Kug Aral. The lake is about 428 km long from north-east to south-west, and its average depth is about 16 m, reaching 20 to 25 m in the middle and up to 68 m in the west. ¹

In prehistoric times the lake stood some 4 m above its present waterline and was linked, through the Uzboy, with the Caspian Sea. It has had no outlet since then. Its level has risen and fallen since the nineteenth century: it fell between 1860 and 1880, rose until 1915, and fluctuated by 3.1 m between 1874 and 1931. The Amu Darya and the Sir Darya flow into it. ¹

Ibn Rusta is the first Islamic geographer to describe the lake, without naming it, and gives its circumference as 80 farsakhs. al-Istakhri and the later geographers describe it, under the name Khwarazm, as a closed salt lake that lay to the right of the road from Gurgandj to the Pechenegs, with no connection to the Sir Darya. al-Mas'udi, by contrast, says that a "Lake of Djurdjaniyya" was linked to the Caspian. Some later writers doubted that the lake existed at all, and others reported that the Sir Darya, in the west, ran out into sand. The entry concludes that these accounts cannot be trusted without checking. ¹