It's Raining Salt in Central Asia

It was raining salt in Central Asia. For three days in May 2018, the west of Uzbekistan and the north of Turkmenistan were hit by a violent storm of salt and sand that has damaged crops, caused serious problems for livestock farms and created significant respiratory problems for the local people.

The salt originated from the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest lake, with an area of 67,000 square kilometers, but now almost entirely a desert. The Aral Sea has been one of the most tragic victims of intensive agriculture. In the 1970s, the former USSR decided to increase its cotton production, causing one of the worst environmental disasters of all time. The huge demand for water for the crop made it necessary to build irrigation canals that drew water from the Syr-Darya and the Amu-Darya, the two rivers feeding the Aral Sea.

As a result, the lake shrunk by dozens of kilometers, creating a new desert that the local people call Akkum (or ''white sands'.  The white comes from salt mixed with the pesticide residues that pollute the land and the lake. When the wind blows, it carries this toxic dust for many kilometers, contaminating surrounding ecosystems and causing not only respiratory problems, but also cancers of the throat and esophagus.

This is not the first time that a salt storm has hit. Serious storms were also seen in the area in the 1990s. But this time the storm is particularly aggressive, the affected area is particularly vast and in some places the maximum concentration of dust in the air is six times higher than normal.

“It’s like living in a fog,” a victim said. “Sandstorms are fairly common in our area, but we’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s a dry fog, which leaves a salt taste on the lips and the skin, and the air is freezing. Everything is covered in white dust: trees, the ground, houses, cars. It manages to get into the houses even through sealed windows. The authorities are silent. There have been no official communications. And we don’t know how much longer it will last or what consequences it will have on our health and food production.”

It is still too early to be able to ascertain the long term effects. Farmers are worried and local experts are talking about the urgent need to clean up crops, soil and pastures to avoid losing their crops, soil salinity reaching unsustainable levels and grazing animals ingesting harmful substances.

The artificial drying of the Aral Sea has led to profound changes to the surrounding climate, of which this storm is just a manifestation. Winters, for example, have become increasingly harsh and summers increasingly scorching, with temperatures coming close to 50°C.