Aral Sea Going Dead

Salt Lake-Sea was once the fourth largest lake in the world. As a result, water from the main feeder rivers (the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers) for irrigation, the lake loses a desired amount of water and start shallow. Now it is impossible to save him.



















Death of Aral Sea, winds rise and spread the bottom salt on hundreds of kilometers around.

Aral a once-large saltwater lake straddling the boundary between Kazakstan to the north and Uzbekistan to the south. The shallow Aral Sea was formerly the world's fourth largest body of inland water. It nestles in the climatically inhospitable heart of Central Asia, to the east of the Caspian Sea. The Aral Sea is of great interest and increasing concern to scientists because of the remarkable shrinkage of its area and volume in the second half of the 20th century. This change is due primarily to the diversion (for purposes of irrigation) of the riverine waters of the Syr Darya and Amu Darya, which discharge into the Aral Sea and are its main sources of inflowing water.



At the Aral Sea in Central Asia, irrigation and water diversion has led to a dramatic shrinking of the lake beginning in the 1960s and continuing today. Historical imagery, which can be viewed as part of Google Earth's imagery, show how the sea is now a quarter of the size it was 50 years ago. See this and other locations of environmental change as part of the UN Environmental Programme's (UNEP) "Atlas of Our Changing Environment."