A Giant Inland Sea Is Now a Desert, and a Warning for Humanity

Walking toward the shrinking remnants of what used to be the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan was like entering hell.

All around was a desert devoid of life, aside from scrubby saxaul trees. Dust swirled in 110-degree Fahrenheit heat under a throbbing red sun. I reached the edge of one of the scattered lakes that are all that remain of this once-great body of water. I took off my shoes and waded in. The water was so full of salt that it felt viscous, not quite liquid.

In the nearby town of Muynak, black-and-white newsreels in the local museum and pictures in the family photo albums of residents tell of better times. During the Soviet era, fishing communities like Muynak ringed the sea, thriving off its bounty: sturgeon, flounder, caviar and other staples of Soviet dinner tables. In the town I met Oktyabr Dospanov, an archaeologist who grew up along the Aral’s shores and recalls a “happy life” in his youth, when fishing boats, passenger ships and cargo trawlers plied the sea’s waves around the clock.

But over the decades, Soviet authorities diverted rivers that flowed into the sea to irrigate cotton and other crops. The world’s fourth-largest inland body of water — which covered an area about 15 percent larger than Lake Michigan — gradually shrank, triggering a domino effect of ecological, economic and community collapse, the kind of catastrophe that could befall other environmentally fragile parts of the world unless we change our ways.

By 2007, the sea’s surface area had shrunk by around 90 percent, leaving Muynak a landlocked way station for tourists who come to marvel at this ecological disaster, where they take selfies near rusting ship hulks that are perched high and dry in the endless sand.

Although restoration efforts in recent years have led to small improvements in some areas, the former expanse of the Aral Sea is a blighted realm, where a scattering of far smaller, brackish lakes lie like puddles in a vast dry basin. The Aral Sea is now the Aralkum Desert. Over the decades, soil and water were contaminated by pesticides and other pollutants, which are suspected of causing birth defects and other chronic health problems in the area.