Physica oceanography of the dying Aral sea / Физическая океанография умирающего Аральского моря

The objectives of this book are twofold. On the one hand, it is aimed at describing the present physical state of the Aral Sea (Chapter 3) as well as identifying likely future scenarios (Chapter 4) based on the data recently collected from the lake. On the other hand, it is intended to provide a concise summary of the existing literature, both recent and “old” (i.e., dedicated to the hydrology of the Aral Sea prior to the ongoing shrinking or at the early stages of the desiccation) (Chapter 2). An overview of the historical background is given in Chapter 1, and some implications of the Aral crisis viewed as part of the global perspective are discussed in Chapter 5. Accordingly, the book combines the information excerpted from the literature (a large part of which was published in Russian in the former USSR and, therefore, has not been readily available to the international reader), with new results. <...>