To cross the Aral Seabed we’ll need to carry a significant amount of equipment and supplies, including up to 60 kilograms of water. It’s impossible to carry this much in a rucksack, necessitating the building of a tough, off-road trolley.
Robbie recently designed and built a prototype of the desert trolley in the UCL Institute of Making, building on the pair’s experience dragging sleds in Svalbard. Its first field-test is coming up!
The Aral Desert began to appear in the 1960s due to an unprecedented combination of poor environmental policy-making and climate change. As the youngest desert in the world, it exists as a symbol of human disregard for the systems around us.
To highlight and explore this modern-day catastrophe, Robbie Mallett and Joe Watson plan to walk across the Aral Seabed in September 2020. This will be a self-supported expedition on foot and by canoe, with an eight mile water-crossing of the last remaining part of the sea on the final day.
Satellite image of the dried up Aral sea on 4th March, 2020
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JFL--H8ewz97NY1OrKRyXTtfoNz3aIN2QKl4nuFQvBw/edit?usp=sharing