The deflection of so much water on to the land by the dam being built on the Amu 

 Darya river to supply the Turkmenian canal will inevitably lead to a lowering in level 

 of the Aral sea, and an increase in its salinity. This is welcomed up to a point be- 

 cause a reduction in subsoil water levels will make available large tracts of the fertile 

 delta of the Amu Darya for cultivation. The Caspian Sea will in time also be affected 

 by the diversion of so much water from the Volga on to the land. 



The effects of irrigation of the new areas, which are equal to one -third of the 

 world's irrigated land, will also be to better the climate over an area estimated at some 

 300 million acres (an area larger than that of Europe), the temperatures will become 

 less extreme and the atmosphere more humid. The probable details of the climatic 

 effects of the schemes and the future water balance of the inland seas are the subjects 

 of much discussion in the Soviet Union. 



The realisation of projects of this kind, which in scale approach those of natural 

 forces, is being carried out by mechanised navvying. In five to seven years about 

 4,000 million cubic yards of earth are being shifted — this represents about sixteen 

 times that moved for the Panama Canal — 25 million cubic yards of concrete are being 

 mixed, and thousands of tons of metal sections and equipment are being used. A 

 labour force of 200,000 persons is operating the machines for this work. Drag -line 

 excavators employ buckets of 18 to 32 cubic yards capacity, and their load can be dug 

 and dumped 130 yards away in a minute. Suction dredgers, having piled up the earth 

 wings to the Tsimlyanskaya dam on the Don, are now in use in the Amu Darya. Each 

 unit is manned by 10 engineers and it can operate down to a depth of 70 feet, churning 

 earth to a suction head from which it is removed by pipe for distances up to 3 miles, 

 and doing the work equivalent to about 10,000 to 15,000 men provided with picks and 

 shovels. Automatically controlled concrete mixing combines and many other machines 

 have been specially designed for the developmental schemes. Routes of communica- 

 tion are being developed, new towns are growing up and are being staked out in the 

 desert ready to receive the water when it comes in 1957. Krasnovodsk, at the Caspian 

 end of the canal, was once a desolate waterless place.; it is now a beautiful modern 

 city with an abundance of greenery, as in Tashkent. 



This wide control over factors which limit life, and the productive development of 

 a large part of the potentially fertile central Asian deserts has been made possible by 

 detailed preliminary planning and by research of many kinds, ranging from purely bio- 

 logical problems to such matters as the properties of alloys and methods of construct- 

 ing dams which will ride earthquakes and not be destroyed by them (as are needed in 

 western Turkmenia). All these things are just as necessary as an ability to meet the 

 scale of the engineering requirements. But above all, it is the integration of the many 

 lines of work, directly of a biological nature and indirectly of biological significance, 

 that is leading to such immense productivity within a few years. 



Only two great rivers traverse these Asian deserts; the Syr Darya is already used 

 almost to capacity for irrigation in Uzbekistan, and the Amu Darya, with an annual 

 flow of 10 and a half cubic miles, is being diverted in part across Turkmenia to water 

 20 of the 37 million acres of potentially productive land. Long term projects are now 

 being planned for the diversion of some 70 cubic miles of water annually from the 



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