Guest
On her latest album, Aralkum, avant-violinist and electronic composer Galya Bisengalieva reflects on what she terms “one of the worst environmental disasters on the planet”, the shrinking of the Aral Sea. Located between Uzbekistan and Bisengalieva’s native Kazakhstan, the Aral Sea was formerly the fourth largest lake in the world, but back in the 1960s the rivers that fed the lake were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects, causing the lake to shrink to 10 percent of its original size by 1997. In 2014, for the first time in history, satellite images captured by NASA showed that the eastern basin of the Aral Sea had completely dried up, leaving what is known today as the Aralkum Desert. At the same time the remaining water in the lake became polluted with fertilisers and pesticides, and the dust blowing off the lakebed degraded the soil of the croplands surrounding the lake and became a public health hazard for those that lived on its banks. It is this process of desertification and desiccation
