Three images of the "ghost island" that appeared off the coast of Azerbaijan in the Caspian Sea, dated from November 2022 (left), February 2023 (center) and December 2024 (right).

As in the case of the Aral Sea, the Caspian’s woes are not been driven only by climate change. ‘Polluted by oil companies’ The Volga, Europe’s largest and longest river located in Russia ...

Photographer Khashayar Javanmardi spent a decade documenting changes affecting the Caspian Sea. This image, taken in May 2019, shows how a breakwater in the Anzali lagoon, has exacerbated drought ...

Damming, over-extraction, pollution and, increasingly, the human-caused climate crisis are driving the decline of the Caspian Sea. Some experts fear it’s being pushed to the point of no return.

Water levels in the Caspian Sea, which sits below sea level, have been falling almost continuously since 1996, and faster still since 2006. By 2100, water levels could plummet by between 9 and 18 ...

Three images of the "ghost island" that appeared off the coast of Azerbaijan in the Caspian Sea, dated from November 2022 (left), February 2023 (center) and December 2024 (right).

Photographer Khashayar Javanmardi spent a decade documenting changes affecting the Caspian Sea. This image, taken in May 2019, shows how a breakwater in the Anzali lagoon, has exacerbated drought ...

The Caspian Sea is the planet’s largest inland sea and its largest lake, an enormous body of water roughly the size of Montana. Its looping coastline stretches more than 4,000 miles and is ...

Kozybakov did not like it. It was salty and “smelled like the sea”, said Kozybakov, an ecologist, now 51. He grew up in Aktau, a city in western Kazakhstan on the shores of the Caspian Sea.