History
The current Karakum Canal was not the first major attempt to bring the Amu-Darya water to the Karakums. In the early 1950s, the construction was started on the Main Turkmen Canal (Russian: Главный Туркменский канал), which would start at a much more northerly location (near Nukus), and run southwest toward Krasnovodsk. The canal would use around 25% of the Amu-Darya's water. The works were abandoned after the death of Joseph Stalin, the current Karakum Canal route being chosen instead. Reservoirs such as Hanhowuz Reservoir were created to help regulate it.
Read more about this topic: Karakum Canal
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)