The loss of the Aral Sea is a haunting example of climate change and industrialisation. Climate change experts from Tashkent have been photographed inspecting the beached ships.

The drying of one of the world’s largest lakes is among the greatest human-made disasters to ever impact the Earth’s surface.

The Aral Sea: August 2000 (left) versus August 2016 ... the Soviet Union diverted both rivers — through a network of dams and canals — for use in cotton fields and other agriculture.

The Aral Sea was once the world's fourth largest lake, but 60 years ago, local industry diverted the rivers feeding the lake to irrigate cotton fields.

Once the world's fourth-largest lake, much of the salty Aral had largely disappeared by the late 1970s, as the rivers feeding it were diverted for irrigation in the Soviet era to water cotton and ...

The Aral Sea has reached a new low, literally and figuratively. ... used to prevent disease and pests from lowering cotton yields, found their way into the sea through its rivers.

In the 1950s, the Soviet Union began diverting the rivers that fed the Aral Sea for cotton production, and over time, it dried out. Sixty years later, it has lost 90 percent of its volume, ...

Devastated by irrigation, the Aral Sea has swiftly disappeared from the landscape of Central Asia since the 1960s. The past 16 years of satellite imagery shows a stunning vanishing act for what ...

To irrigate cotton fields in Central Asia, ... when the World Bank gave Kazakhstan the first $68 million credit to build a 13-kilometer-long dam to split the Aral Sea into halves: ...

Mr. Dreyer, an editor and writer, wrote from Muynak, Uzbekistan. Walking toward the shrinking remnants of what used to be the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan was like entering hell. All around was a desert ...