Lake Sevan Part I
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| Lake Sevan From Space Wikipedia |
Located at an altitude of nearly two thousand meters above sea level, Lake Sevan is one of the largest alpine lakes in the world. As such, it has been considered extremely important throughout Armenian culture, economically and ecologically.
The Soviet Drainage of the Lake
Currently, close to one fifth of all livestock raised in Armenia can be found in the Sevan basin, ninety percent of all the fish caught in the country is caught in Sevan, along with eight percent of the crayfish. Other possible economic benefits caught the interest of Stalin and Soviet engineers which led to the current poor state that the lake is currently in. In 1910, an Armenian engineer by the name of Suqias Manesserian published a book, “The Evaporating Billions and the Stagnation of Russian Capital.” In it, he concluded that due to the amount of evaporation being more than twice as high as the average direct precipitation the level of the lake should be lowered. By reducing the surface area through a drainage system, the water that was being lost to evaporation could be used for power generation and irrigation. His original idea was to drop the water level by fifty meters, leaving a lake of only 240 km² out of the original size of 1,416 km². In the early 1930s, Manesserian's plan was implemented and when the drainage tunnel was completed in 1949, the water level started to drop at the rate of one meter per year. Before the drainage was stopped, the water level had dropped 19.88 meters, a reduction in volume of 44% (58.5 km³ to 32.9 km³), and a shrinking of the surface area by 180 km².i
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| Sevan Water Level Lake Sevan: Experience and Lessons Learned Brief |
When the water level dropped, engineers not letting a potential money maker go waste, planted many artificial forests. Even today along the Sevan to Vardenis road, one will see many groves of pine trees planted in regular lines bordering the lake. Acacia, willow, and sallow thorn were planted as well. The unfortunate side effect of this planting is that all of these new species are non-native which has disrupted the migratory patterns of birds and much of the wildlife surrounding the lake. One of the most drastic effects has been on the ishkhan, or Sevan trout.ii By affecting the spawning grounds of the ishkhan, human impact on Lake Sevan took a fish that was harvested commercially, with yearly catches of more than 5,000 metric tons up through the 1940s, to an endangered specie. In 1983, the last year ishkhan catches were recorded, the catch had dropped down to a mere 8 metric tons.iii
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