The wounds of the Barrier Reef and the disappearance of the Aral Sea: two sides of the same coin

by Paolo Ghiga

On 3 April, the Chinese cargo Sheng Neng 1 of Cosco Group, with a load of assist tonnes of coal and 970 tonnes of oil, stalled at the Great Barrier Reef which stretches over two thousand kilometres along the coast of Queensland. Contains the initial loss of 3 tonnes of oil with dust and chemicals, high tide of 13 April reported the cargo on the waterline.
The hull of the ship has created a channel in the barrier plus 3 km long and up to 250 meters wide and fears they feed also paint of the same, highly toxic. The damage could be reabsorbed in 20 years, although the experts are for its irreversibility, also confirmed by catastrophic tones used by the international press. The Great Barrier Reef back media spotlight, and then, after the revelations of the journal Science, January 2009, State of health of its biodiversity threatened by climate change and whose growth would have fallen by 14% over the last 19 years, risking zeroing by 2050. These data alarmist blackening hope fueled, in part, the draft constantly barrier dating back some years ago.
In November 2007, the Foundation and the Politecnico of Milan (Italy), in collaboration with Turin Wireless and the University of Queensland in Brisbane, have realized a monitoring system to study the evolution of the barrier and the slightest environmental variation. A series of buoys, connected to a wireless network, transmit to a base station, for the subsequent revision, the data concerning temperature, salinity, brightness, etc. The future goal is make its negligible environmental impact through the miniaturization of buoys and creating the intelligent smart dust.

While enquiries of the Australian authorities, on the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan is consumed the tragedy of the Aral Sea. The Soviet Government, at the conclusion of the second world war, practiced a wrong policy of intensive cultivation, and diverted the course of the two rivers that fuelled the Lake to irrigate cotton fields and the surrounding areas and drying the basins. It was the beginning of his slow agony. The project leader, Grigory Voropaev, stated that he wanted to sacrifice, in the name of agriculture, an "error of nature", as the Lake had a huge mass of water in an extremely poor area of water resources. The immense silted headline would have enabled a profitable rice cultivation. Herbicides and pesticides polluted the neighbouring territories, while the decline of the line the coast of 150 km in 40 years has revealed a graveyard of ships in a desert of sand and salt.
The geographical location, evaporation, and the winds blowing carrying sand contaminated by chemical agents, have contributed to the increase of serious respiratory and renal. Recently the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, shocked by the current situation, like many news agencies have stressed, has invited the Governments of neighbouring States to overcome old grudges to try to save at least part of the Salt Lake of oceanic origin.
A project of the World Bank and the Government of Kazakhstan led to the creation, in 2005, a barrier at Kokaral, on the north side of the Lake, driving in the small Aral River Syr Darya. Though encouraging, so that the media see it as a sort of miracle, the results are proved sufficient. In the South, which covers three quarters of the surface and borders with Uzbekistan, it continues with the intensive cultivation of rice and drillings, renouncing all useful. Satellite images show a decrease in the volume of 80% in the last three years: his fate has scored.

On the one hand decades of errors and neglect, on the other a handful of minutes and a risky maneuver: as the cut-off line of time man, persevering in its anthropocentric presumption despite the environment clearly shows the signs of his deep wounds.