Once-mighty Aral Sea reduced to largely salt

Striking photos from NASA show that the Aral Sea, once the fourth largest lake in the world, has shrunk to its smallest size in modern history. Dwindling water stocks follow more than five decades of humans siphoning from the rivers that feed the sea and a recent summer that was hotter and drier than usual.

The central Asian body of water — the remnants of an ancient, larger body of salt water — has been reduced to fraction of its former size, with wind carrying the remaining salt and sand for hundreds of miles around the region, damaging crops.

“It is likely the first time it has completely dried in 600 years,” Philip Micklin, a geographer and Aral Sea expert, said in a statement from NASA.

The borders of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan straddle the former boundaries of the fast-drying sea. Soviet engineers in the 1950s started using water from the two rivers that supplied water to it, the Syr Darya in the north and the Amu Darya in the south, for the irrigation of farms.

By 2001, the disappearing lake had split into two halves, one smaller northern segmant and another larger southern half. By building a dam between the northern and southern halves in 2005, Kazakhstan tried to stem the shrinkage of the northern part of the sea. Engineers allowed the Syr Darya to continue to flow into the smaller, northern basin of the sea. 

But for the larger, southern basin, the one that is now dry, the dam was a “death sentence” because it prevented the flow of water, NASA said.

The Aral Sea is not the only body of water threatened by human acts. The Dead Sea – which borders the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel and Jordan – is also shrinking fast. Both Israel and Jordan use the mineral-rich water to extract valuable commodities used in cosmetics. Israel has also dammed the Jordan River, which used to supply water from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea.