Disappearance of Aral Sea

In a dramatic series of satellite photos, NASA has documented one of the great environmental disasters of the last century: the disappearance — and near death — of the Aral Sea in Central Asia. Once the world’s fourth-largest lake, the Aral Sea became the victim of a grand Soviet public works project that diverted the water bound for the inland body of water and pumped it into the desert to grow cotton and other crops. By 2000, when the first photograph in this series was taken by NASA’s Terra satellite, the Aral Sea had already shrunk by more than half since the diversion projects began in 1960. The photographs show that by 2009, the sea has nearly disappeared altogether, with its once extensive southern portion little more than a swirling cloud of dust and salts heavily contaminated by agricultural chemicals. The Kazakhstan government completed a dam in 2005 that has restored some water to the northern lobe of the sea, but has led to the near-complete desiccation of the southern half.