Waiting for the sea

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-31588720

by edward • 11 years ago

70 20 11 years ago

bbc.co.uk

It's amazing how quickly the Aral dried up (well 90% of it).

arethuza2• 11 years ago

Worth noting that the Mediterranean dried up (or got close to drying up) a few times in, at least in geological terms, the fairly recent past:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messinian_salinity_crisis

PlzSnow• 11 years ago

These "immersive" stories will disappear once the realization that the RIO on them doesn't work. Who actually sits down and passively consumes media in this half passive/half active way?

The only companies left using them will be those with no concern about ROI such as here; the state-funded BBC.

barking• 11 years ago

I agree with you, I found this irritating, maybe it will improve in the future. In the meantime the wikipedia article is much more user friendly in my view : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

_lce0• 11 years ago

I really would like to disable such scroll animations

Jolijn• 11 years ago

I like it! I scroll through until I find an interesting picture, then read the part of the text that goes with it. In the end I read most-but-not-all of the article, in a haphazard sequence.

reacweb• 11 years ago

I think it is a bit like reading a "glossy magazine". It is not the same expectation as an encyclopedia, but it is pleasant to read (at least for me).

michaelbuckbee• 11 years ago

I liked it as well, I think these kind of "immersive" stories are highly execution dependent and in this particular case quite well done.

In particular the series of 3 slides (pages) - that showed the lake shrinking over time were quite effective at conveying just how much of a calamity the situation is.

andyjohnson0• 11 years ago

the state-funded BBC

The BBC is not funded by the state. It's funded by the people in the UK who pay for a TV licence, plus some income from selling its products outside the UK.

Its definition of ROI is different to that of a purely commercial player.

joshuaheard2• 11 years ago

The state imposes a TV tax which it uses to fund BBC. I would call that "state-funded" myself. (The fact that they resell some of the content overseas doesn't change that.)

d_theorist• 11 years ago

Of course it is state-funded. The state has made a law that requires anybody who wants to own a television to pay money to the BBC.

chhib• 11 years ago

Swedish heavily ad-funded tabloid Aftonbladet is also experimenting with immersive stories. http://story.aftonbladet.se/spice/2 (This about the drug trade with "Spice".)

I think the news industry is basically trying everything to see how to capture the increasingly mobile user base. Hopefully this is a step away from advertisors' impression frenzy.

arethuza2• 11 years ago

Well, as a UK citizen who pays their license fee I thought this worked rather well - I'm quite happy for the BBC to try things like this.

mrcarrot• 11 years ago

I read this on my iPad this morning and, although I like the idea behind the presentation, I found it really annoying that when I scrolled the line of text I was reading to the top of the screen, it would often start to fade out while it faded in the next section further down the screen - it was like reading with the screen brightness turned right down.

Altough, looking at it again now from desktop Chrome, I can't reproduce this, even at a small screen size.

madaxe_again• 11 years ago

I visited Aralsk a few years back (it's Aralsk, not Aral - the locals call it Aralsk, the signs all say Aralsk), and it's a gobsmackingly depressing place.

The main industry there is now "sitting and waiting", and the old waterfront is a dismal shadow of a bustling fishing port.

One thing that we found interesting was North Korea's involvement - there are quite a few buildings in Aralsk emblazoned with Kim Il Sung - it turns out they invested in the cotton boom, and provided "labourers" to the USSR.

Tourism is practically non-existent - the only way to get there is a long, long drive (or cycle... we bumped into an Aussie cycling from Shanghai to Dublin (we were en route from London to Bishkek)) through barren desert.

It's hard to see how Aralsk will continue to exist, with or without the return of the Aral, as the population is overwhelmingly old (although we did see a rather extravagant Kazakh wedding parade while there), and levels of corruption in Kazakhstan are pretty astounding, meaning that getting any concern off the ground is a challenge for your average person, unless they happen to be the son-in-law of the local police chief.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when the Baikonur lease is up (most there believe this will happen much sooner than 2050), as it's a major source of revenue for the region, and provides much of the raison d'etre for the surrounding towns and cities. Most people we met between Aktobe and Kyzylorda were either in some way involved in supporting the operations there, or were subsisting, or providing auxiliary services to people directly involved in Baikonur.

One final thing that seems to generally be missing from people's understanding of the Aral sea - it hasn't "dried up", so much as "gone underground" - there's still a vast amount of (severely polluted) water there - if you wander down to the old sea floor, most of it is several-yard-deep mud - very little of it is dusty and dry.

vkb• 11 years ago

Anyone interested in a more thorough and context-ladden history of Aralsk, Uzbekistan, and the transition from the Soviet Union to a sovereign country should check out Tom Bissell's great, great book, Chasing the Sea [1], about his time a Peace Corps volunteer there and afterwards. Great writer, really interesting topic.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/233072.Chasing_the_Sea

Waiting for the sea

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