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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

"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.

A child plays inside a rusted dilapidated car along the dried-up Aral Sea, in the village of Tastubek near Aralsk, Kazakhstan, Monday, July 2, 2023. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi) 32,903 people played ...

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).

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.

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… ...

Stock image of boats on a dried lake-bed in Uzbekistan, left from the rapid drying of the Aral Sea. Over half the world's lakes are drying up, scientists have found, and it's mostly our fault.