A toxic salt storm from the Aral Sea hit western parts of Uzbekistan and northern Turkmenistan on Sunday, May 27, 2018, following a warm weather and rain. The dust covered the whole city of Nukus, forcing residents to use masks as the storm made it difficult to…
Summer 2014 marked the first time the eastern basin of the South Aral Sea has completely dried. The once-extensive lake in Central Asia has been shrinking markedly since the 1960s. The main causative factor until the 1960s was the periodic westward diversion of the Amu
The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth largest lake or inland sea – a rich haven for fish, birds and other wildlife. The Aral Sea began to shrink in the 1960s, when massive diversion of water for cotton and rice cultivation under the Soviet Union drained the two
With water diverted to irrigation, the inland Aral Sea has shrunk dramatically. Many areas were completely dry by 2009. Each frame of this timelapse map is constructed from a year of Landsat satellite data, constituting an annual 1.7-terapixel snapshot of the earth at
The size of the Aral Sea has long hinged on the Amu Darya, which flows from the high Pamir Mountains in central Asia, across the desert, and into the southern sea. While two rivers empty into the lake—the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya—the Amu Darya is the largest and
The long popular lake, home to migrating flamingos, pelicans and gulls, has shrunken by 60 percent and could disappear entirely in just a few years, experts say — drained by drought, misguided irrigation policies, development and the damming of rivers
