Declining Water Level of Caspian Forcing Ships to Change Their Routes and Preventing Larger Vessels from Using Many Ports, Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 10 – A meeting of specialists on the Caspian Sea during Baku Climate Action Week said that the declining water level of the Caspian is already on course to have all the effects that the death of the Aral Sea had on the surrounding countries in Central Asia.

            But among its most immediate and serious consequences already have been two, the experts said. On the one hand, because water levels are declining, ships are having to change their routes on it to avoid running aground. And on the other, many ports aren’t able to process larger vessels (casp-geo.ru/iz-za-obmeleniya-kaspijskogo-morya-peresmatrivayutsya-podhody-k-navigatsionnoj-bezopasnosti/ ).

            For the time being, the first of these problems is being handled by distributing constantly updated maps of the depth of the sea in various places and directing captains to change their routes to avoid places where the sea, never that deep, has become too shallow for safety.

            But the second is more difficult. Dredging can only go so far in solving this problem because if too much of the sea floor is removed around piers, they will collapse. Consequently the only short term option is to significantly lengthen the piers into deeper water, something that is both increasingly expensive and increasingly difficult.

            That means that many ports will be temporarily or in some cases even permanently off limits to larger ships and that the littoral countries will have to consider creating entirely new ports, possibly on created islands far from the existing coast lines, an extremely costly but perhaps only reasonable option.