Report Reveals World’s Fourth Largest Lake Now a Deadly Desert

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Report Reveals World’s Fourth Largest Lake Now a Deadly Desert

Before the 1960s, the fourth largest lake on Earth glistened for miles across the borders of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

By 2015 most of that shiny surface was reduced to a hauntingly barren expanse, birthing the world’s newest desert and impacting 3 million people that live in the surrounding region.

The

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once spanned 68,000 sq km (26,000 sq mi), but

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all that currently remains is a few slithers amounting to about 8,000 sq km of water. The rest of its bone-white seabed now forms the Aralkum desert.

The Aral Sea as seen from satellites in 1989 compared to 2024. (

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)

“It is certainly one of the biggest environmental disasters in the world,” Ibrahim Thiaw, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification,

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.

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the loss of this inland sea

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the region’s atmospheric dust between 1984 and 2015, from 14 to 27 million metric tons.

The airborne former lakebed has reduced air quality in neighboring cities, even as far as 800 kilometers (500 miles) away, and is contributing to the acceleration of

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. This is then further exacerbating the region’s water crisis.

Storms spread these damaging salts, destroying crops

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, and contaminating drinking water.

Aralkum’s dust is particularly toxic compared to the rest of the region’s desert dust because it contains runoff from

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and is full of

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from the same mass agricultural practices responsible for draining the Aral Sea.

Between the 1960s and 1990s, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers that flowed from the mountains to supply the lake were redirected to irrigate

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for the Soviet Union.

The massive-scale irrigation that’s continued since in various forms rapidly reduced the lake, eventually splitting it into two slithers, and connecting its hundreds of islands to their surrounding banks.

Salinity concentrations in the remaining water increased to levels higher than the ocean, destroying most of the native life within and collapsing the local ecosystem. This destroyed the livelihoods of many people, as illustrated by the rusted fishing boats now strewn across the arid sands.

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Ship cemetery near Moynaq, Uzbekistan. (HomoCosmicos/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Exposure to the dust has been

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issues in adults and children in the region, including

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. In an effort to contain the toxic dust, regional governments have been working on vegetating the former lakebed, with

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for plants hardy enough to tolerate the salty soil.

The

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and

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have recently offered assistance for this mass undertaking, but this is

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.

What’s happened to the Aral Sea isn’t just some distant tragedy the rest of the world can afford to ignore, as the same circumstances are being repeated globally. Lakes and other land-based water systems in

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,

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,

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,

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, and

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are all shrinking due to industrialized agricultural and climate pressures.

The Aral Sea is a stark warning of the deadly and complex consequences of failing to prioritize enough water for the local environment.

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#Report #Reveals #Worlds #Fourth #Largest #Lake #Deadly #Desert

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