A sea turned to sand
The town of Muynak was once a busy fishing port on the southern shore of the Aral Sea, which was the fourth-largest lake on Earth. Today, Muynak is a desert town, over 150 kilometers from the water's edge. Where fishing trawlers once brought in thousands of tons of fish, their rusting hulls now sit motionless on a sea floor of sand and salt. This "ship graveyard" is the most visible result of a large-scale environmental transformation that began in the 1960s.
The cause was a massive water diversion project initiated by the Soviet Union. To transform the arid lands of Central Asia into the world's largest cotton-producing region, engineers diverted the two main rivers that fed the Aral Sea: the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. This plan effectively cut off the sea's inflow, leaving it to shrink under the desert sun. By 1990, the sea had lost 40% of its surface area and 60% of its volume. By the 2000s, it had lost more than 90% of its area and split into separate, smaller lakes. The eastern basin of the main South Aral Sea completely dried up by 2014, creating a new desert called the Aralkum.
An ecosystem erased
The ecological consequences of the sea's disappearance were immediate and severe. As the water volume dropped, its salinity skyrocketed. The salt content rose from a level comparable to other brackish lakes to levels far exceeding that of the ocean, increasing from about 10 grams per liter to over 100 g/l in the remaining southern basins. This killed off nearly all the native fish species, including carp and sturgeon, and destroyed the region's fishing industry, which had employed between 40,000 and 60,000 people.
The newly exposed seabed, covering over 50,000 square kilometers, is contaminated with salt, pesticides, and fertilizer runoff from decades of agriculture. Each year, powerful dust storms pick up millions of tons of this toxic dust and carry it across hundreds of kilometers, degrading agricultural land and causing serious health problems for local populations, including respiratory illnesses. The disaster also altered the local climate. The sea's large water body once moderated temperatures, but its absence has led to colder winters and hotter, drier summers.