Aral Sea
An endorheic saline lake that all but vanished within a lifetime
The Aral Sea is the cautionary tale of the modern environmental age — once the fourth-largest lake on Earth, an endorheic saline lake spanning some 68,000 square kilometres between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, now mostly a poisoned salt desert. In the space of a single human lifetime, Soviet engineers diverted the two great rivers that fed it to irrigate cotton fields, and the lake collapsed. Where fishing fleets once worked, rusting ships now sit stranded on sand dozens of kilometres from any shore, a fleet marooned on the bed of a sea that disappeared beneath them.
The Aral had no outlet, and it survived only on the inflow of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, balanced against evaporation. When those rivers were tapped in the 1960s, that balance broke. By the 2000s the lake had split into fragments and lost the vast majority of its water and area — today the surviving waters cover only a fraction of the original, with a much-reduced maximum depth, and what remains is far saltier than before, in places too saline for the native fish. The exposed seabed, the Aralkum, has become a new desert of salt and toxic, pesticide-laden dust.
The human cost has been heavy: the fishing economy that once employed tens of thousands collapsed, dust storms carrying salt and agricultural chemicals harmed the health of people for hundreds of kilometres around, and the local climate grew more extreme without the moderating mass of the lake. Yet there is a sliver of recovery. The Kok-Aral Dam, completed in 2005, has trapped the Syr Darya's flow and partly revived the North Aral Sea in Kazakhstan, where the water has risen, the salinity has fallen, and a modest fishery has returned to one corner of a once-vast sea.