The drying of one of the world’s largest lakes is among the greatest human-made disasters to ever impact the Earth’s surface.

After the Aral Sea dried up, it devastated the livelihood of locals like Batimova who worked as a researcher for a local fish plant. But a dam completed in 2005 that divided the lake managed to ...

The Aral Sea, which used to be the ... Could Lake Mead End Up Drying Out Like the Ill-fated Aral Sea? Published Dec 26, 2023 at 3:00 AM EST Updated Dec 27, 2023 at 3:06 PM EST . By . Jess ...

The Aral Sea in Central Asia dried up over the last half-century, beaching ships and dealing an economic blow to lakeside communities that are now dozens of miles away from the new shoreline.

"Back then, no one could imagine that the sea would dry up." The Aral Sea was once the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, taking up some 26,300 square miles.

Mar de Aral (NASA Terra-Modis) / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0 Central Asia's Aral Sea is the poster child for large, dried-up bodies of water. Where the lake once sat, on the border of Kazakhstan ...

More information: Wenzhi Fan et al, Weak asthenosphere beneath the Eurasian interior inferred from Aral Sea desiccation, Nature Geoscience (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-025-01664-w ...

“Back then, no one could imagine that the sea would dry up.” The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, with some 68,000 square kilometers (26,300 square miles).

Sixty years ago, the Aral Sea began drying up, leaving salty, barren soil in its wake. Lessons learned here will help other parts of the world experiencing climate change. The Aral Sea was once ...

A DRIED-UP sea has left fishing boats rusting away in a desert graveyard miles away from any water. The arid plain in Central Asia, once in the Soviet Union, is now a wasteland – but it had o… ...

As the Aral Sea dried up a desert was left. There are several problems with this. The salt levels in the sea continued to get saltier and by 2004 the sea was 5 times saltier than it was in 1960.

MUYNAK, Uzbekistan (AP) — Brushing the dust from his hat and lying on the floor inside his home, Ali Shadilov recalls how he and other fishermen used to laugh at ...