Issue |
E3S Web Conf.
Volume 575, 2024
Second Central Asian DUst Conference (CADUC-2 2024)
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 04004 | |
Number of page(s) | 5 | |
Section | Aral Sea region as dust source and dust sink | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202457504004 | |
Published online | 11 October 2024 |
Assessment of the transfer of the dust-sand-salt material from the dry bottom of the Aral Sea
Institute of Seismology, Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, Uzbekistan
* Corresponding author: uz-hydrolog@mail.ru
The study of the Aral Sea and its impact on the natural environment of the adjacent areas is one of the long-standing problems of hydrometeorology. Around the middle of the last century, individual scientists and then individual institutions took part in these studies, but the most thorough study of the Aral Sea and its basin began in the late 1950s – early 1960s of the last century. The existence of the Aral Sea is almost entirely determined by the inflow of river water into it. A significant decrease in the volume of flow in the Amu Darya and Syr Darya basins, the waters of which are taken for irrigation of huge crop areas (about 7 million hectares), is the main reason for the steady decline in sea level. Irretrievable flow withdrawals have already completely exhausted the compensatory capacity of these rivers and led to the disruption of water and salt balances. By the beginning of 1990, the area of the Aral Sea was decreasing by 1.8 and 2.8 times compared to long-term averages, with the level dropping by 14.3 meters compared to 1961. If the rate of level fall remains the same, by 2030 the level will have fallen by about 18 metres. This rapid recession has exposed large areas of the sea floor. In 1980, the area of formed land reached about 10 thousand km2, and in 1990 27 thousand km2, and in 2020 56 thousand km2 and the former Aral Sea bed became a source of sand, dust and salts. The open surfaces of saline soils of light mechanical composition began to undergo intensive weathering processes, which led to the development of dust-salt storms and the transport of dust and salt aerosol to the adjacent territories of the Republic of Kazakhstan and Central Asia, including irrigated farming massifs in the Amu Darya and Syr Darya deltas. Visible dust-salt plumes detected from artificial Earth satellites are several hundred kilometres long. This indicates the large-scale nature of the process of solid phase particles entering the atmosphere, as well as their prolonged transformation in the suspended state. The article considers the issues of assessment of dust-sand-salt material transport from the dried Aral Sea bed, as well as the conditions of origin and development, their dynamics, local structure, distribution areas and others.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2024
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.