But irrigation projects started by the Communists in the 1960s caused the “sea of islands” to steadily shrink over the following half-century — a trend that could eventually cause the sea to entirely dry up.
A nearly fivefold increase in the basin’s salinity due to evaporation and irrigation has killed most native plants and wildlife.
By 2007, the lake had shrunk to only 10 percent of its original size. Once-thriving fishing villages have disappeared, leaving the sea’s original shoreline as a graveyard of ships.
What’s left behind is a white, salty terrain now called the Aral Karakum Desert. Violent windstorms pick up at least 150,000 tons of salt and sand each year from the Aral Karakum, transporting it across hundreds of miles.
The airborne material causes serious health problems and changes in climate downwind.
In the series of three images to the right, the last 10 years of the Aral Sea’s decline can clearly be seen.
In the top image taken in 1999, the sea had already shrunk into two lobes. By comparing the images from 2006 and 2009, it is clear that the eastern lobe has shrunk by 80 percent, as estimated by the European Space Agency.
It’s predicted that both the eastern and western lobes of the lower Aral Sea will disappear entirely by the year 2020.
A dam project funded by the World Bank and completed in 2005 has raised the water level of the “small” Aral Sea, seen at the center top of each image, by about 7 feet.
This has allowed salinity levels to fall, and fish are once again being found in numbers high enough to possibly allow fishing to resume.
The destruction of the greater Aral Sea is considered by many environmental experts to be one of the world’s greatest manmade ecological disasters.