From Elizabeth Young
Caroline Williams’s article on the Aral Sea missed out one of its possible fates back in the 1980s – a bad idea that got quite a long way (4 January, p 34). This was to reverse the flow of one or more of the great north-flowing rivers, using nuclear explosions to blast new channels for them. The effects on the Kara Sea, and therefore on the Arctic Ocean, which is where a lot of our weather is made, could have been disastrous.
The idea was to allow the overuse of water for irrigation in the southern republics to continue. Williams is right about the bad construction of the canals, which are neither lined nor covered, and the water lost from them amounted to just about what they hoped to get from the reversed rivers.
Even now, odd things are still happening to the much larger Caspian Sea.
London, UK
