One of the most remarkable bodies of water on the face of the earth is the Caspian Sea. Known to the ancients as the “Pool of the Sun,” it has intrigued travelers and scientists from the earliest times to the present.
This sea is of tremendous importance to the Russian economy, for closely connected with it are great industries—oil, shipping, fishing, and chemical. But the industrial life of this area is now being seriously threatened because of an unusual situation. The Caspian Sea has been steadily shrinking in size.
The Caspian, land-locked between Russia on the north and Iran on the south, is actually a salt-water lake—the largest in the world. About the size of California, it is now 92 feet below Mediterranean Sea level.
The first accurate observations of the changes in the level of the sea at Baku, one of its major ports, were made in 1830. Since then, the drop in sea level has been considerable. But there has been nothing in recorded history to compare with the spectacularly continuous decline that has taken place since 1929. At present, the level is the lowest it has been during the last 400 years. It has been estimated that the sea has lost about 16,000 square miles from its maximum area during its recent history.
At the time of the glaciers, the Black, Caspian, and Aral Seas were all one body of water. At the end of the glacial period, these seas became separated, but the Caspian was still connected with a forerunner of the Baltic sea.
The records of the observations of various geographers and explorers show the dramatic changes that have taken place in the Caspian throughout its history.
About 2400 years ago, Herodotus, the historian and traveler, visited the Caspian, and astute observer that he was of interesting phenomena in foreign lands, made actual measurements of the width of the southern third of this sea. His data show that it was then 2½ times wider than it is now, overflowing large areas in the west and east that are now completely dry land. The Caspian was still connected with the Black Sea, but by a mere vestige. This was an insignificant canal, the humble remnant of what was once the Manych Strait. The Greeks referred to it as the “Cimmerian Ferry.”
Two hundred years later, however, Patroclus, a Macedonian, found that a significant change had occurred. The Manych Strait had now vanished entirely. What was left of it was a swamp through which no vessel could pass. The level of the sea was now 66 feet above sea level.
Steadily, relentlessly, the shrinkage continued. The waters gradually retreated from the Manych Divide (land formerly covered with water), and the Caspian even lost its connection with the waters from the Baltic region which had once flooded it. And 2½ enturies later, Strabon, the geographer, through an analysis of the positions of various rivers, was able to prove that the level of the sea had fallen to about 30 feet below that of the ocean.
Not long after that, in Pliny’s times, the level dropped still another eight feet, and was continuing to sink rapidly.
The main feeder of water into the Caspian is the Volga River. In the 4th Century, a Greek geographer, Agaphimer, observed that the Volga was pouring substantially less water into the sea than it used to. The Caspian was rapidly drying up, reducing still further its level and its contours.
Two centuries later, the drying-up process had a very significant result: The shoals of the Baku archipelago were gradually becoming linked to the mainland. Soon this area became favorable for settlement, and on it was to rise the great port of Baku—one of the most important cities in Russia.
But in the 8th Century, the dying sea seemingly bestirred itself, and slowly began coming back to life. The crisis of drying was at last broken as a result of the Volga again feeding an abundance of water. Gradually, but steadily, the level began to rise from the lowest point it had ever reached —185 feel below sea level.
For a while it used to be thought that the Caspian had never been higher than 16½ feet above what its level was in the 20th Century. The Russian geographer, Leo Berg, had been intrigued by the fact that deposits containing a cockle, Cardium edule, were never found higher than 16½ feet above the level of the sea in modern times. For this reason he believed that the level of the sea had likewise never risen above this figure.
However, Berg seemed to lack a very important piece of information about the habits of this cockle. In the less saline waters of the Caspian, Cardium edule makes its appearance only below 16½ feet, preferring greater depths for maximum development.
N. Knipowich, one of Russia’s foremost oceanographers, and perhaps the greatest authority on the Caspian, has estimated that 550 years ago the level of this sea was more than 36 feet higher than now. But in the 18th and 19th centuries the sea was only 10 feet higher.
After 1925, a short but steady rise in sea level took place, which lasted until 1929. Then the ominous process started again— with a relentless persistence this time that has broken all records. By 1945 the level had dropped about 6½ feet.
The effects of this retreat of the sea have become spectacularly obvious along the northern shores of the Caspian, where large areas, formerly covered by water, are now hard, dry land. Several submarine bars and shoals have now emerged as islands. What were formerly islands have now become peninsulas. Both the Komsomolets and Kaydak Gulfs have dried into salt marshes.
The area most involved has been the shallowest part of the sea—and therefore the most important from an industrial viewpoint. The shallowness and low salinity of this section have made it the most valuable fishery resource of the Soviet Union, providing 35% of the total catch. In these plankton-rich waters thrived the sturgeon, famous for the caviar made from its roe, the salmon, herring, and carp.
But these fishes are now in serious trouble. The extreme shallowness of the waters have made it very difficult for them to migrate upstream to spawn. The disappearing waters have also left fishery structures and curing plants high and dry, and the annual catch of fish has been reduced.
At Baku, on the west coast of the Caspian, is one of the greatest petroleum deposits in the world—making this city one of the principal oil bases in the USSR. Baku produces more than half the petroleum in the Soviet Union, and the shipping of this product coastwise to Astrakhan was one of the major features of Russian maritime commerce.
But the shrinkage of the Caspian has affected shipping navigation channels so that they are not deep enough for the movement of vessels operating with full loads. This has already had serious repercussions on shipping, and may eventually affect the oil industry. So low is the sea for large areas off-shore, that it is necessary to use shallow vessels to trans-ship goods. Most of the ships plying coastwise are side-wheelers or stern-wheelers, which are not of deep draft.
At Kara-Bugaz-Gol, a gulf of the Caspian, is one of the world’s largest natural depositories of sodium sulphate, which is very valuable in industry. This salt dries out in enormous quantities from the water through evaporation caused by the blazing heat of the sun. But with the recession of the Caspian waters has also come the stranding of the installations for processing the salt, far from the original shoreline. So the sulphate industry is now also in jeopardy.
The shrinkage of the Caspian is not the only peculiarity about this sea. It would be difficult, indeed, to think of another body of water with so many oddities. Completely landlocked, and with water being constantly evaporated from its surface, one would expect the Caspian to be one of the most salt-laden of seas. Quite the opposite is true. So weak is the salinity of the sea (1.3 per cent average, compared with 3.5 per cent for the oceans in general) that in some places, particularly in the north, the water can be drunk.
For a long time this weird phenomenon puzzled the students of the Caspian. The mystery has been well expressed by A. Beeby Thompson, in his book, The Oil Fields of Russia: “This peculiarity revives a special interest to discover how a sea, once in communication with the ocean, and in which evaporation is equal to the supply of water coming in, has not only failed to increase in density, but actually decreased in salinity.”
We now know the answer to this riddle. On the east shore is the previously mentioned Kara-Bugaz-Gol, a natural evaporating basin, drawing off the waters of the Caspian and depositing salt on the shore. About 350,000 tons of salt are removed daily from the Caspian by this basin. Were it not for this escape valve, the Caspian would long ago have become so saturated with salt, as to make it one of the most saline bodies of water on the globe, probably as saline as the Dead Sea.
The Caspian is practically tideless. Its surface currents move in a counterclockwise direction, following the coasts, but modified by changing winds and, in the north, by the discharge from the Volga. The speed of the permanent currents is low—the average being about a tenth of a knot and never exceeding one knot.
Deep down, in the southern part, the waters are stagnant and foul with poisonous emanations of hydrogen sulphide, making the bottom inhospitable to plant and animal life. In this respect it resembles the Black Sea.
The fishes of the Caspian are unusual for the high oil content of their flesh. There has been some speculation that the accumulation of the carcasses of these oily fish throughout the ages may have played a dominant role in the development of the enormous petroleum deposits in the Caspian area. As a matter of fact, thousands of fish are carried in each day to Kara-Bugas-Gol, there to perish in the highly saline waters. Their bodies are later deposited in salt and sand (the latter being swept in by the winds) and it may well be that another major oil field is even now in the making in this section. Winters are very cold in the north and northwest, and parts of the sea are there covered with ice. Summers, however, are very hot—particularly in the south. The warm wet climate gives the southern Caspian shore a languorous, relaxing atmosphere which reminded the novelist Loti of a hothouse. The Persian poet, Firdausi, referred to this section somewhat ecstatically as “a land of perpetual spring.”
It is during the winter that those unusual warm, dry winds, called “foehns,” appear. Generally they are observed along the western and southern coasts, swooping down suddenly from the mountain tops. The rises in temperature produced by these “foehns” are fantastic. At Baku they have been known to shoot the mercury in the thermometer up 25 degrees Centigrade in the dead of December, and 30 degrees in March. The natives call these awesome winds “guermiches.”
Nothing, except a tropical tornado, can compare with the terrifying fury of the summer sandstorms on the eastern and southwestern shores. At Baku, particularly, these gales take on a nightmarish quality. As a matter of fact, the name of this city is derived from Bade-Kube, which means City of Winds. When weeks or months have passed during the hot summer without the relief of rain, the whole area becomes covered with a powdery sand. And then, suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, a gale rips with vicious fury into Baku. In no time at all, a darkly sinister yellow mist fills the atmosphere, which thickens so swiftly that the sun’s rays are suddenly blanked out.
As this happens, everyone drops what he is doing and rushes frantically for shelter. If anyone is unlucky enough to be trapped out of doors, his eyes, nose, and ears are soon filled with grit. The sand drives with such a fearful speed into his face and hands that his skin feels as if it were being massaged with sandpaper.
It is of no avail to keep the lips tightly closed. The sand penetrates into the mouth and the teeth grind against it at the slightest motion of the jaws. There is no escape, both indoors and outdoors, from the dust. It encrusts the face with a film of sand, fills the pockets, clogs the works of watches, seeps into rooms whose windows have been closed, and settles on steamers miles out at sea.
Because of the grit getting into the lungs and digestive tract, there is a high rate of silicosis and digestive disorders among the population.
The Russians have for a long time given a great deal of thought to the Caspian, being particularly perplexed by its shrinkage. Many ingenious explanations and hypotheses have been offered to account for this phenomenon.
One Caspian authority, A. Chaplygin, believes that the root of the recent troubles lies in climatic changes, such as reduced rainfall and increased temperature, that have taken place in the Volga and Kema basins, resulting in a smaller flow of water into the Caspian. The increased use of water as a result of the expansion of industry and the population has also contributed to the decline, he thinks.
Other experts say there has been a general subsidence of the bottom of the sea, and that the increasing shallowness of the northern waters is due to an accumulation of sediments poured in by the Volga.
But W. Koppen, a German oceanographer who has studied this sea, has stated, “There is no foundation for the assumption that the Caspian level has been affected by movements of the earth’s crust, and that the variations have any meteorological significance.” The Soviet Union’s official handbook of sailing directions, the Caspian Sea Pilot, curtly declares that “a satisfactory explanation has not been offered.”
Whatever the real explanation may be, Russia since the time of Peter the Great has tried to do something about the its disappearing sea. Peter himself conceived the notion of leading the Amu Darya (Oxus River), which had once drained into the Caspian, but now flows into the Aral Sea, back to its original home. In that way he hoped to achieve his dream of an uninterrupted waterway from the Caspian to India. Peter only dreamed about it, but Stalin actually undertook the fulfillment of this idea. We shall see later what happened to this grandiose scheme.
In 1720 the first chart of the Caspian was published in Russia under the title, “A Flat Picture of the Caspian Sea.” Numerous commissions and surveys were later organized for the systematic investigation of this body of water. The most important and formidable of these occurred in recent times, when the pressing urgency of the problem became apparent. The latest study was under the auspices of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Many have been the proposals for rescuing the Caspian, some of them extravaganzas. One suggestion was that the losses from evaporation could be reduced by cutting off the gulfs, such as Kara-Bugaz-Gol. Other schemes called for the diversion of water from the Baltic, Black, and Azov Seas into the Caspian by means of canals.
The most stupendous of these projects, originally conceived by Peter the Great, was actually started under Stalin’s regime. This was the fabulous Turkmen Canal, and was intended to link the Aral Sea in the Kazakhstan Soviet Socialist Republic and the Amu Darya (Oxus River) of Uzbekistan with the Caspian Sea at the port of Krasnovodsk. The length of this canal was to be 670 miles, and was to have been completed by 1957.
There has been a recent report that this, as well as other vast engineering projects, has been abandoned by the regime, possibly because enormous numbers of laborers are needed to cope with the Soviet Union’s agricultural problems. Whether it will ever be resumed is unknown.
So, the ultimate fate of the Caspian is still in doubt. Should the level continue to drop, the Caspian may eventually shrink into a small useless lake, where the evaporation of its water is exactly balanced by the inflow from rivers and precipitation.