A la Sala de Graus de la Facultat de Ciències, a partir de les 12h30.

Hector-Eduard de Prado Herrero

The Aral Sea (Kazakhstan) began to dry up in the 1960s as a result of the large irrigation programs promoted by the Soviet Union. Today, 90% of the original surface of what was the fourth largest lake on the planet has been lost, a catastrophe for the ecosystem and the hundreds of thousands of people who depended on the world's most productive freshwater fishery. Now, an ICRA-led team has visited the now-dry lake bed to sample sediment cores and find out if the biggest natural disaster of the 20th century still has a surprise in store: the release of tens of millions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere promoted by the decomposition of the organic carbon accumulated in the ancient sea sediments over millennia. This is a rather outreach-kind-of-talk that reviews the history of the Aral Sea and describes the goals and adventure of the research team during the summer of 2022 in Kazakhstan, with some bits of the results that have already been obtained.