Once the world's fourth-largest lake, the Aral Sea is now a barren wasteland. This is the story of its dramatic collapse—one of the worst environmental disasters in history.

The Aral Sea was once the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, taking up some 26,300 square miles. Colossal steel ships sailed on deep blue water filled with sturgeon, ...

“The fish factories closed, the ships were stranded in the harbor, and the workers all left,” said Zhasekenov, former director of the Aral Sea Fisherman Museum in Aralsk, Kazakhstan. “It ...

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. But what happens when ...

The eastern basin of the once-great Aral Sea dried up completely in the month of August for the first time in modern history. Soviet irrigation projects set up in the 1960s to support the Uzbek ...

From Aral, it’s another 70 kilometers farther to reach the coast of the shrunken sea. In the late 1980s, the shallowing Aral Sea split into two parts.

MUYNAK, Uzbekistan (AP) — Toxic dust storms, anti-government protests, the fall of the Soviet Union — for generations, none of it has deterred Nafisa Bayniyazova and her family from making a ...

Central Asia's desiccated Aral Sea is steadily rising as Earth's mantle beneath it bulges, new research suggests. The uplift is due to the "quiet Chernobyl" environmental disaster that struck the ...

Climate change is fueling the disappearance of the Aral Sea. It’s taking residents’ livelihoods, too ...