Lake Sevan Part I

Lake Sevan Part I

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

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

i http://www.ilec.or.jp/eg/lbmi/pdf/21_Lake_Sevan_27February2006.pdf

ii http://www.nature-ic.am/biodiv/eng/strategy/2/index-11.html

iii http://www.ilec.or.jp/eg/lbmi/pdf/21_Lake_Sevan_27February2006.pdf

The People

This is the second of a three part series to commemorate the twenty-second anniversary of the Armenian earthquake of December 7^th, 1988.

Part I can be found here. Part III can be found here.

The People

In any natural disaster, there is almost invariably loss of life. The forces of the earth care little for families or loved ones, jobs or who you owe money to. Avalanches, earthquakes, mud slides, wild fires see humans and animals as nothing more than soft obstacles that get in the way. As unforgiving as nature can be, and the idea that bodies are to be expected after large natural disturbances, humans can not forget the dead. A disaster the magnitude of the 1988 earthquake affects everyone; rich people, poor people, men, women, children, grandparents, soldiers, teachers, and everyone in between.

The most common estimate of the casualties of the earthquake that happened in 1988 counts approximately twenty-five thousand people dead. Another fifteen thousand were injured by falling debris or in the general pandemonium that followed. However the most sobering statistic was that over a half a million people were left homeless.ⁱ What makes homelessness so important after a natural disaster, is that it is a persistent problem. Not only does a family lose everything they have worked for their entire lives, their homelessness becomes a defining characteristic. “He used to be a teacher, but now he struggles just to feed his family. She used to own a store, but it was destroyed.” The psychological toll disasters take on those affected can never properly be measured in numbers.

Of those who died in the earthquake, children bore a disproportionate toll. Almost two-thirds of those killed during this radical restructuring of the landscape were children. In one school of 302 children, 285 (94%) were killed. The schools that were built during this time were simply unable to cope with such traumatic forces. Almost four hundred children or youth institutions were destroyed or damaged. In Spitak and Gyumri alone, 105 schools and kindergartens were destroyed. This statistic is alarming on its own, but when added that there there were only 131 schools in the two communities, the full scope of the tragedy is known.ⁱⁱ

While the loss of life is regrettable, and injuries are obvious so they can be taken care of fairly immediately, the issue of people who lost their homes in this tragedy is still being felt in Armenia today. In the city of Gyumri, official statistics from the Armenian government put the number of families still displaced by the earthquake at almost four thousand. Of those families, many are still living in the “temporary housing” provided by the Soviet Union two decades ago. After the earthquake, contractors from all the Soviet Republics except for Azerbaijan, and the international community were brought in to rebuild, which was only supposed to take two years. With the collapse of the Soviet Union reconstruction slowed dramatically with only only two thousand new apartments built between 1994-2003.ⁱⁱⁱ One of the major issues with the new apartments that are currently being built is that the government is giving out vouchers worth about $10,000 USD, but the average apartment sells for $12,000 - $15,000 and many people do not have the savings available to cover the remainder.

Living conditions in a Gyumri
apartment. ArmeniaNow

While this construction is occurring, people are still living in housing that is can only be called sub-standard, and that is an understatement. Since Spitak was obliterated, the original reconstruction was focused there and the living arrangements are decent and livable. Now Gyumri is the biggest concern. There are eighty-eight apartment blocs that are considered unsafe. Of those eighty-eight, ten are said to be extremely dangerous and may collapse at any minute. Unfortunately, these apartment blocs are not uninhabited. It is a sad fact that twenty years later, people are still living and trying to raise a family in apartments that have not been rebuilt, or repaired in any way, and are forced every day to hope and pray another disaster does not strike and bury their lives once again.^iv

i http://warnercnr.colostate.edu/avprojects/98proj/world_volc/web_docs/armenia.html

ii http://www.aaets.org/article38.htm

iii http://www.armenianow.com/features/7961/waiting_earthquake_s_legacy_stil

iv http://www.armenianow.com/features/8926/earthquake_legacy_decaying_buildin

The Earthquake

This is the first of a three part series to commemorate the twenty-second anniversary of the Armenian earthquake of December 7^th, 1988.

Part II can be found here. Part III can be found here.

The Earthquake

On December 7^th, 1988 at 11:41 local time, a large earthquake devastated Shirak and Lori Marzes in northwestern Armenia. The city of Spitak was reduced to rubble, while the cities of Gyumri (then Leninikan) and Vanadzor (then Kirovakan) sustained serious damage as well. Seismologists for USGS measured the earthquake as having a magnitude of 6.8 on the Richter scale.ⁱ For a contemporary comparison, the recent earthquake that occurred in January of 2010 in Haiti had a magnitude of 7.0.ⁱⁱ Because of the way magnitudes are calculated using base-10 logarithmic scale, each increase of whole number depicts an increase of approximately 31 times the energy released.ⁱⁱⁱ The largest recored earthquake happened in 1960 in Chile and had a magnitude of 9.5.^iv

Armenia lies in an area where it is affected by the convergence of the Arabian and Eurasian Plates. The Arabian Plate encompasses the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Gulf, and extends west almost to the Mediterranean Sea. The Eurasian Plate is much larger. It meets the North American plate about halfway across the Atlantic Ocean and stretches all the way to Japan and runs north through Russia. The Arabian Plate is slowly moving north and is responsible for the creating of the Zagros Mountains in Iran.^v This northward migration of the plate caused the earthquake of December 7^th.

The reason that Spitak was hit the hardest by the earthquake is because the epicenter was located along a small fault line directly under the city.^vi Geologists have determined the focal point of the earthquake to be ten kilometers beneath the surface. The type of fault that broke the surface here is defined as a dip-slip fault by the United States Geological Service. In this instance, the fault is termed reverse because the rock above the fault moves up as opposed to down. A thrust fault is a reverse fault with a dip less than 45 degrees.^vii A small flash animation demonstrating the movement of a thrust fault by USGS can be found here. Four minutes after the original shock, the area was assaulted with an aftershock with a magnitude of 5.8. Five days later, on December 12^th, 1988, the Director of the Soviet Institute of the Physics of the Earth said at least 191 aftershocks were registered after the initial earthquake.^viii

The direct economic cost of the earthquake was placed at $14.2 billion (US) based on the exchange rates of the day. Much of this cost occurred in Spitak which was close to being completely destroyed. Gyumri incurred a large portion of this cost as well. More than half of the buildings in Gyumri were destroyed or damaged. Stepanavan, Vanadzor, and other small cities and villages in the northwestern part of the country also sustained damage.^ix Exact numbers according to USGS are, 314 buildings were destroyed, 641 needed demolishing, 1,264 needed strengthening and repairs. Of all the buildings, after the earthquake only 712 (less than twenty five percent) were inhabitable.^x

Damage in Spitak. Warner College of Natural Resources, Colorado State University.

This area of the world is no stranger to powerful movements of earth. In 893 an earthquake occurred that cost an estimated twenty thousand lives. In 1667 another eighty thousand were killed. In more recent history, devastating earthquakes have been recorded in 1894, 1899, 1914, 1920, and 1926. The movement of the Arabian Plate has also affected Georgia and Turkey. Turkey was hit with a 7.3 magnitude earthquake that is responsible for 5,000 deaths and another in 1983 which was registered as having a magnitude of 6.9 and killed 1,300 people.^xi

i http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/events/1988_12_07.php

ii http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2010rja6.php

iii http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/richter.php

iv http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/facts.php

v http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagros_Mountains

vi http://warnercnr.colostate.edu/avprojects/98proj/world_volc/web_docs/armenia.html

vii http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/glossary/?termID=59

viii http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/events/1988_12_07_ev.php

ix http://warnercnr.colostate.edu/avprojects/98proj/world_volc/web_docs/armenia.html

x http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/events/1988_12_07_ev.php

xi http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/events/1988_12_07_ev.php