The Aral Sea’s disappearance became one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters, but one corner refused to die |
In 1960, the Aral Sea ranked among the largest lakes on the planet, spreading across the border of what is now Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Within a single human lifetime, most of it was gone. Soviet planners had redirected its two feeder rivers to irrigate cotton fields across Central Asia, and by the 1980s the lake…