The Vanished Sea

The following is an excerpt from the new book Dust: The Modern World in a Million Particles by Jay Owens published by Abrams Press ©2023

It’s midnight on the dance floor when the DJ drops a track that makes my heart skip.

I’m in Moynaq, a tumbleweed town of 13,500 people in remote western Uzbekistan—and the site of one of the worst humanmade environmental disasters of the twentieth century: the drying up of the Aral Sea, once the fourth largest lake in the world.

Here, for two nights in late August 2019, at a memorial to the vanished sea, world-class techno pulses from an unexpectedly capable sound system out into the empty desert night. Green lasers trace a sky thick with stars as, around me, hundreds of people go wild, dancing like they have never heard this before—because most of them never have.

This is Stihia, a word meaning ‘an inevitable force of nature’. It’s a two-day techno festival curated by lawyer Otabek Suleimanov and the Fragment crew, nurturers of a nascent techno culture in Tashkent, as Uzbekistan begins to open up culturally and politically since the death in 2016 of the repressive President Karimov.

But can a rave possibly do anything meaningful for this remote and ravaged place, the ‘last stop on the road’, as Aleksandr, a Tashkent techno DJ and one of the other Stihia organisers called it, as we stood in blazing sunshine on the steps of the Saviinsky Art Museum in Nukus, after it was all over? Or are some places too peripheral, and some dreams too unlikely?

The drying-up of the Aral is sometimes described as the ‘slow’ or ‘silent’ Chernobyl: a humanmade catastrophe sixty years in the making, yet one nobody seemed to notice until years after the water had already gone. A dream of modernity and scientific progress turned to toxic dust, with human consequences that echo on for generations. And it’s the harbinger of countless more water crises to come, as the world heats up this century and water becomes a resource that’s fought over. Yet, in the West, no one seems to know anything about it.

But I was in Moynaq because I wanted to see the thin sliver that remains of a disappearing sea—and the dust that is left when the water is gone.

Starting from Nukus, we drove north. The Ustyurt Plateau is an austere 200,000 square kilometres of chalk and limestone. No roads go up this western side of the Aral Sea: instead we drive at a brisk eighty kilometres per hour on dirt tracks, the Toyota Hilux truck kicking up a plume of dust hundreds of feet long. The tracks braid in and out of each other, yet Max, the driver, knows where to go unerringly, no map, compass or GPS needed. As we drive, birds rise from the low, dun-coloured vegetation on top of the plateau, flurries of life and alarm. They too are mostly dun-coloured, because everything here is dun-coloured: the plants, caught in some desiccated moment between life and death; the bird life, the ground, the earth that rises into the air, the old Kazakh grave sites that show where trade routes used to run, connecting with the Silk Road further south at the now abandoned, waterless city of Konye-Urgench. Only the sky above is blue, a clear, high desert blue that is, of course, cloudless. A ragged cliff edge rends and collapses down to what was once the sea’s edge.

And then, finally, I see it. It is late afternoon, the light golden, shadows growing longer over the scrublands and dunes running down to the water’s edge, mineral deposits staining the soil cream and ochre. The sea is bright, a supersaturated Persian blue, the colour of lapis and tiles. It looks almost unreal, like a child’s drawing of what a sea should be. I can see the shore on the other side. The western Aral—all that’s left of the sea in Uzbekistan—is only about twenty kilometres wide. 

Close up, the Aral Sea smells like something sick. It’s catastrophically saline but there’s none of the briny ozone freshness you associate with the ocean. Instead, down by the water, the air is heavy and smells strange, semi-edible and nearly sweet, like stirfried noodles left too long in the sun. The depths are contaminated with hydrogen sulphide: rotten eggs. I stand barefoot, calf-deep in the fine, sticky mud of its shoreline, and find myself too repelled by it to swim.

The sea is a mirror. It changes with the light, reflecting the sky—from roseate pink at dawn to mirrored silver-white minutes later. During the morning it becomes the exact same blue as the sky so that there is no boundary visible between the two, and it is as though the whole sea has vanished. Sarsenbay, my guide, says he’s seen it black, during storms. Given the chance to go down to the water again the next morning, I declined.

I came to Uzbekistan to understand what was once a sea, but found that easier to do from a distance, from a vantage point where the sea wasn’t just a sad, stinking, dead place—but also somewhere golden eagles soar on thermals off the edge of the plateau, hunting for mice and gophers in the saxauls and scrubby, salt-loving succulents reclaiming the land metre by metre, as the water withdraws.

Two days later we drive back towards Moynaq from the northwest, across what was once the bed of the Aral sea. An off-road descent a hundred metres down the crumbling cliff face of the Ustyurt plateau, then two hours and perhaps one hundred kilometres across the cracked clay of the old seabed. It’s a saxaul forest now: tough, salt-proof shrubs as far as the eye can see, alongside low domes of glossy-leafed, ground creepers. We get out of the car, and it is utterly silent. Seashells crunch underfoot, pristine, as though they were deposited by the tide that morning. I try to stop my breath, so I can hear the nothingness better.

In the distance is a gas plant, a vast new alien industrial steelscape dropped into the desert where the water used to be. The state oil and gas company Uzbekneftegaz provides 15 per cent of GDP and wants to become the next Shell or BP. Sixty-two billion cubic metres of gas were processed in 2014, most of it used domestically—but the ambition is to export. Up on the plateau we had crisscrossed newly laid pipelines hauling the gas out to Kazakhstan and Russia. 

This is the new Silk Road, a northern, overland fork of China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’. As I write, the China National Petroleum Corporation has just signed a partnership to integrate Uzbekistan’s transmission into the Central Asia pipeline that runs from Turkmenistan through to Xinjiang. Yet China must compete with Korea for access to this fossil wealth: the ‘Uz-Kor’ gas chemical complex on the plateau is a $3.9 billion development seeking to capture more of the value-add from the hydrocarbon chain. Instead of the natural gas being shipped abroad for processing, polyethylene and polypropylene plastics are now being manufactured in Uzbekistan. This is what modernisation means here today, as one environmental disaster gives way to another. It brings jobs to a region that badly needs them—but the money stays where the money always stays, back in the metropole.

I’m told to stop taking photographs: the infrastructure in this country is a matter of state security.

Meanwhile, word is that the president wants to redevelop Moynaq into a Central Asian Las Vegas. It seems hard to credit, but I keep asking the Tashkent contingent at the festival and they keep insisting it’s true. It’s difficult to imagine this dusty, ravaged place as a tourist attraction—and yet on a small scale it is one already. The attraction it sells is disaster.

Some years ago, ten fishing boats were transported from where they had beached as the waters receded, and arranged in a kind of park beneath the sail-shaped Aral Memorial. They are wholly rusted out now, engines long gone and sold for scrap. One has lost most of its hull and stands like the skeleton of a great whale, all metal ribs and memory. They are listed in all the guidebooks to Central Asia; they are why international tourists come to Moynaq, the only reason. The rusted metal glows copper and orange in the early evening light and makes for quite the photograph.

It is a strange playground. There’s little in the way of signage to guide or instruct any particular kind of response. People climb on and into the boats, which would seem disrespectful except that stairs have been added to a couple of the boats for this very purpose. Festival-goers sit up there for hours, drinking beers, talking about everything and nothing, as travellers do. Most of all, everyone shoots selfies and posts them to Instagram, local people and travellers alike. The light is golden and very flattering—and it gets branded as narcissism. In 2019, Calvert Journal reported on the trend as ‘another example of disaster tourism’s self-indulgence’. But I’m not so sure it is.

At that time, photography at Chernobyl itself was also under examination, as images of an influencer posing artfully in a hazmat suit and thong underwear circulated to considerable condemnation. ‘It seemed wrong to reformat horror in an aesthetically pleasing way, then hope people engaged with it by tapping a Like button,’ internet culture reporter Taylor Lorenz wrote, analysing the controversy. ‘Part of the reason people get so angry at images like [these] . . . is because of a perceived gap between where attention should be aimed (the tragedy of Chernobyl) and what viewers interpret to be the focus of the photo (a person posing for the camera).’

Yet putting oneself in the photograph is how pictures are taken these days. People take selfies at the Aral Sea memorial to show that they were there, and to say to others that this is a place of significance. It might be diluted as a method of bearing witness, but it is nonetheless a means of seeing, not turning away. The world has turned its back on the Aral Sea disaster: it’s old news now, and the region doesn’t trouble the international press with more than a handful of stories a year. If a self-portrait on a friend’s Instagram feed is how people get to learn about what happened at this place, I see little to fault with that.

‘Even though it’s not gonna help bring water back, to me it was worth doing Stihia for people who live there’ Aleksandr the Tashkent DJ told me. ‘They’ve been abandoned and forgotten for many decades, striving to live in these conditions they have to endure. And to me, it’s not just to bring music and do a party there, at the city on the last point of the road, at the dead end. It’s at least to give them the feeling that they are not left alone in this salty pesticide sand pit.’