NASA’s Terra satellite has documented the changes in Aral Sea over the years and images show the water body being a fraction of the size in early 2000s compared to what it was in 1960s.
NASA said: “In the 1960s, the Soviet Union undertook a major water diversion project on the arid plains of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The region’s two major rivers...were used to transform the desert into farms for cotton and other crops. Before the project, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya rivers flowed down from the mountains...and finally pooled together in the lowest part of the basin. The lake they made, the Aral Sea, was once the fourth largest in the world.”
Drought and irrigation caused the sea to shrink over the years.
NASA then added: “As the Aral Sea has dried up, fisheries and the communities that depended on them collapsed. The increasingly salty water became polluted with fertilizer and pesticides. The blowing dust from the exposed lakebed, contaminated with agricultural chemicals, became a public health hazard.”
