May/June 2013 Lite Challenge Entry: Dying Sea

[WillP]

In the 1960s the Soviet Union undertook a very ambitious project to turn the deserts of the Uzbek SSR into a breadbasket. They diverted the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, the two major rivers feeding the Aral Sea, to provide irrigation for these new farmlands.

Inasmuch as watering the desert, the USSR was somewhat successful, and Uzbekistan now is a major cotton producer, but the cost was to destroy the inland sea and destroy a thriving fishing industry.

The map I'm working on for the challenge is the sea itself, but I want to show in one map how it has shrunk. So far, I have drawn the outlines, but I need to decide how to depict them without making the map unreadable. I also want to provide inset thumbnail maps showing each step.

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Aral Sea.jpg

[Korash]

Neat idea. Have you thought of using lighter shades of blue to indicate progressively older levels of the water?

[WillP]

Neat idea. Have you thought of using lighter shades of blue to indicate progressively older levels of the water?

Great Idea. I'm through for the night, but how does this look?

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Aral Sea 2.jpg

[Bogie]

Nice work. Looks like you are on the right track.
Trying to make a good thing, they destroyed a better thing. Typical government, they are all the same in their lack of intelligence.

[WillP]

I have the bulk of the map finished, the rest should just be ornamentation and proofreading.

I decided to reduce the number of sea level changes to five: 1960, 1970, 1990, 2000, and 2008 and as can be seen, I put thumbnails for each. There are no mountains of consequence in the area, and it's completely desert, so no forest to apply either.

Let me know if anybody sees anything else I need to address.

### LATEST WIP ###
Aral Sea Map.jpg

[WillP]

I've learned quite a bit about this region by working on this map.

Check out this picture to get an idea of the devastation.

[- Max -]

Nice idea. Coastiles are a bit pixellated though and the way you fill all the cartouche with text isn't really aesthetic. Leaving some empty space all around the text would make it more pleasant to read Also the way you just put eh years labels on the smalls cartouches looks a bit rushed in my opinion.

[WillP]

Nice idea. Coastiles are a bit pixellated though and the way you fill all the cartouche with text isn't really aesthetic. Leaving some empty space all around the text would make it more pleasant to read Also the way you just put eh years labels on the smalls cartouches looks a bit rushed in my opinion.

Thank you much Max. I made some alterations to it, including enlarging the base canvas so I could spread the cartouches out some as well as enlarging the lower cartouche. This gave me the added benefit of being able to increase the font.

I'm not sure how to fix the pixellation on the main map, I made it at 150/inch, which I was hoping would be fine enough for most monitors without making the file overlarge. I did add some noise to the sand texture which is underlaying the map, do you think that could be the problem?

### LATEST WIP ###
Aral Sea 2.jpg

[- Max -]

NOt sure, your rivers don't look as much pixellated as coastlines. About the map and cartouches I'd try to have same space between them. The bottom cartoucge looks sticked to the map which is odd. Also be careful when using overlay on labels, that makes some colors variations that doesn't look very good. You may want to use solid color instead to make more legible. And I keep thinking that the text on the bottom cartouche need more space around it inside the cartouche to let it breath a bit. Well that's just my two cents

[WillP]

Max,

Thank you very much for the pointers. I think I got the pixellation problem fixed. I enlarged the file to double size, redrew the coastlines by hand, then shrank it back down. I also tweaked the coloration of the lake to hopefully make it easier to see.

As for the lower cartouche, I reduced its size and then decided to condense my narrative to make it neater.

I would recommend anyone wanting to become more familiar with what has happened to the Aral Sea to go here for a good start. It really was an environmental atrocity.

### LATEST WIP ###
Aral Sea 3.jpg