Conference Venue
The Caspian Sea, like the Aral Sea, Black Sea, Lake Urmia, and Lake Van, is a
remnant of the ancient Paratethys Sea. It became landlocked about 5.5 million years
ago due to tectonic uplift and a fall in sea level. During warm and dry climatic periods,
the landlocked sea almost dried up, depositing evaporitic sediments like halite that
were covered by wind-blown deposits and were sealed off as an evaporate sink when
cool, wet climates refilled the basin. One of the most vulnerable ecosystems to
climate change is the enclosed and inland seas.
The climate change trends observed in these waters are generally more complex
than that characteristic for the open ocean. The
Caspian Sea
is the largest enclosed
inland body of water on earth by area, variously classed as the world's largest lake or
a full-fledged sea. It is in an endorheic basin (it has no outflows) and
located between
Europe and Asia. It is bounded
to the northeast by Kazakhstan, to the northwest by
Russia, to the west by Azerbaijan, to the south by Iran, and
t o the southeast by
Turkmenistan. It is now -28 m below the normal sea level.
Due to the current inflow of fresh water, the Caspian Sea is a
freshwater lake in its
northern portions. It is more saline on
the Iranian shore, where the catchment basin
contributes little flow. Currently, the mean salinity of the Caspian is one third that of
the earth's oceans. The Karabogazgöl embayment, which dried up when water flow
from the main body of the Caspian was blocked in the 1980s but has since been
restored, routinely exceeds oceanic salinity by a factor of 10.
The
Aral Sea
was an endorheic lake lying between Kazakhstan (Aktobe and
Kyzylorda provinces) in the north and Uzbekistan (Karakalpakstan autonomous
region) in the south. The nam e roughly translates as "Sea of Islands", referring to
over 1,100 islands that once dotted its waters; in Old Turkic
Aral
means "island". The
Aral Sea drainage basin encompasses Uzbekistan and parts of Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The shrinking of the Aral Sea has been
called "one of the planet's worst environmental disasters". The r egion's once-
prosperous fishing industry has been
essentially destroyed, bringing unemployment
and economic hardship. The Aral Sea region is also heavily polluted, with
consequential serious public health problems. The depar ture of the sea has
reportedly also caused local climate change, with summers becoming hotter and
drier, and winters colder and longer.
In the late 1990s,
Lake
Urmia
, in north-western Iran, was twice as large as
Luxembourg and t he largest salt-water lake in the Middle East. Since then it has
shrunk substantially, and was sliced in half in 2008, with consequences uncertain to
this day, by a 15-km causeway designed to shorten the travel time between the cities
of Urmia and Tabriz. Historically, the lake attracted migratory birds including
flamingos, pelicans, ducks and egrets. It’s drying up, or desiccation, is undermining
the local food web, especially by destroying one of the world’s largest natural habitats
of the brine shrimp
Artemia
, a hardy species that can tolerate salinity levels of 340
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