The Shipwreck of the Aral Sea

Aralsk fishing village ( Kazakhstan).The Aral Sea lies on the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and it was the world's fourth-largest lake until the Soviets decided that the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, would be diverted for irrigating the desert in order to grow rice, melons, cereal, and specially thirsty cotton crops. Since large scale irrigation began in the 1960s, the sea's surface area has shrunk more than 60 percent, and its volume by almost 80 percent. Former fishing villages as Muynak and Aralsk are now dozens of kilometres away from the shoreline.