Aral

Aral, LAKE, separated by the plateau of Ust-Urt from the Caspian Sea, is the largest lake in the steppes of Asia. It lies wholly within the limits of Russian Central Asia, embracing an area of about 24,000 sq. m. It is fed by the Sir-Darya (the ancient Jaxartes) on the NE. side, and the Amu-Darya (or ancient Oxus) on the SE. It has no outlet, and is generally shallow, its only deep water being on the west coast, where it reaches a depth of 225 feet; but it shoals gradually eastward to a mere marshy swamp. Its level is 117 feet above that of the Caspian, which is 84 feet below the surface of the Black Sea. Like other lakes which are drained only by evaporation, it is brackish. Fish, including sturgeon, carp, and herring, are abundant. The lake is dotted with multitudes of islands and islets. Owing to the shallowness of its waters, and its frequent exposure to fierce and sudden storms from the NE., navigation is difficult; and a flotilla of flat-bottomed gunboats, built for this sea by the Russians, and which took part in the operations against Khiva in 1873, alone patrols its surface. The history of the Sea of Aral is very remarkable. Sir Henry Rawlinson and Colonel Yule collected references made to it in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Persian writers, and established the fact that the area it now occupies has been dry land twice within historical times—the Jaxartes and the Oxus then running south of the Sea of Aral to the Caspian. This was the case during the Greco-Roman period, and again during the 13th and 14th centuries after Christ. The Russian government, which pushed its frontier as far east as the Aral in 1848, has abandoned the idea of the diversion of the Oxus to the Caspian Sea, and has proposed to unite the two lakes by means of the steppe river Chogan, round the northern edge of the Ust-Urt plateau. See the article ASIA; Proceedings of Royal Geographical Society; and The Shores of Lake Aral, by Major Wood (1876). Also, for the formation of the lake, see Roesler's Aralseefrage (Vien. 1873).