It was once the fourth largest lake in the world, but what used to be an expanse of water in the basin of the Kyzylkum Desert now lies almost completely dry.
The Aral Sea has been retreating over the last half-century since a massive Soviet irrigation project diverted water from the rivers that fed it into farmland, according to a report by The Independent.
Images taken from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on Nasa’s Terra satellite have now depicted how since the turn of the century the lake has increasingly shrunk until this year saw its eastern lobe dry up completely. The lake was at one time fed by the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers which flow down from the mountains before making their way through the Kyzylkum Desert where they pooled together at the lowest part of the basin.
An irrigation project by the Soviet Union in the 1960s however took water from the rivers to transform the desert into cotton farms. While the massive diversion of water allowed the desert to thrive, it had a devastating effect on the Aral Sea. This series of images starts in the year 2000, by which time the lake was already a fraction of what it was before the irrigation project started in the 1960s.
The images show how the smaller Northern Aral Sea had separated from the Southern Aral Sea, which itself had broken up into an eastern and a western lobe, the two sides still barely connected at both ends.
The following year however this connection had been broken and the eastern part, although larger in surface area, rapidly disappeared in the subsequent years.
While there appears to have been some fluctuation between 2009 and 2014, as a result of alternately dry and wet years, the overall pattern sees the eastern lobe consistently shrink until dry conditions this year caused it to completely disappear.
In 2005, Kazakhstan built a dam between the Northern Aral Sea and the Southern Aral Sea in a bid to save part of the lake, according to the Nasa Earth Observatory.
The changes have also brought dire consequences to the people surrounding the lake, with the communities that depended on them collapsing as the water dried up.
Meanwhile, the water left in the lake became polluted with fertilizer and pesticides, which has caused a public health hazard now contaminated dust is blown up from the exposed lakebed, the Nasa Earth Observatory reports. In 2010, a documentary depicted the dramatic desiccation of the Aral Sea, which has now become a byword for ecological calamity.