How a Disappearing Sea Became a Town's Main Attraction鹹海消失，小鎮成生態危機景點

Vendredi 16 Mai 2025

The fierce windstorm that walloped this small defunct port in late spring stunned even a local ecologist long resigned to the devastation wrought by the disappearance of the ample Aral Sea.

A thick, stinging haze greeted the ecologist, Gileyboi Zhyemuratov, as he stepped outside that day in May. "When you opened the door, everything was white like snow, " said Zhyemuratov, 57, a descendant of generations of fishermen in a place where are no longer any fish.

For three days, the tempest hurled silt off former seabed of what was once the planet's fourth-largest inland body of water. It blotted out the sky and left the residents of the former port, Muynak, in western Uzbekistan, chewing salty grit. Even the rain turned brackish, sending panicked farmers scrambling to rescue crops.

As the storm blew in, Vladimir Zuev, a retired Russian pilot turned tour operator, was sitting beneath his shady pergola, where the garden gnomes consist of a bust of Lenin and other Soviet icons.

"It was impossible to see, " he said.  "The salt was dry, yet it adhered to the skin and was difficult to wipe off. You could barely wash it off with water." The flowers in his garden withered.

Paradoxically, the man-made disaster strangling the town has become its main attraction in recent years. Tourism is booming.

"A lot of people want to see an ecological crisis, " said Vadim Sokolov, head of the Uzbek branch of the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea.

Where waves once lapped at the harbor's lighthouse, rusting trawlers now sit abandoned on the  sandy seabed far below, like dinosaur bones bleaching in the sunshine.

A selfie from the ship cemetery has become a must-have for the Instagram crowd.

Ali and Poline Belhout, a Parisian couple in their 30s, stopped in Muynak on their yearlong around-the-world tour. "It is sad to see that some years ago there was a sea, and now it is only a graveyard for ships, " she said. "To see boats docked like that is a little freaky."

Once lacking a hotel, Muynak now has three, along with an internet cafe, and the government is organizing an electronic music festival here on Sept.14.

The sea, which vanished from Muynak around 1989, is now more than 75 miles away. The only water view is in the modest local museum, with its tattered photographs and nostalgic oil paintings of the once blue horizon.

That unprecedented storm last May confirmed a grim prognosis: The environmental fallout from the loss of the Aral Sea is intensifying.

The sea's disappearance "is not just a tragedy, as many people have said, it is an active hazard unfolding before our eyes, " said Helen Fraser, head of the United Nations Development Program in Uzbekistan.(Neil MacFarquhar) 

紐約時報賞析/聯合報107.8.26(日)D4