Earth  ID: 10862

Shrinking Aral Sea

Story by Robert Simmon and Rebecca E. Lindsey | Visualizations by Robert Simmon Released on February 16, 2012
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Abandoned boats now rest on sandy scrubland that was once the basin of the world's fourth largest lake.
In the 1960s, the Soviet Union undertook major water diversion projects on the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers, capturing water that once fed into the Aral Sea. Irrigation projects made the desert bloom, but they spelled doom for the natural freshwater lake. As the Aral Sea dried up, fisheries collapsed, as did the communities that depended on them. The remaining water supply became increasingly salty and polluted with runoff from agricultural plots. Dust blowing from the exposed lakebed eventually degraded the soils, forcing further water diversion efforts to revive them. On a larger scale, loss of the Aral Sea's water influenced regional climate, making the winters even colder and the summers much hotter. Fifty years later, the lake is virtually gone. View the dramatic changes that took place over decades in this collection of satellite images.
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Satellite images show the changing water levels in the Aral Sea from 2000 through 2011.
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A satellite image from 1964 shows the Aral Sea before the dramatic decline in lake levels altered the shoreline.
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False-color images taken by USGS-NASA Landsat satellites show what was once an island gradually becoming part of a peninsula.
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Southern parts of the Aral Sea nearly vanished between 2000 and 2009, though a dam helped stabilize areas in the north.
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Heavy spring rains briefly returned water to the Aral Sea in 2010, but lake levels visibly dropped just a year later.

For More Information

NASA Earth Observatory

Story Credits

Lead Visualizer/Animator:
Robert Simmon (Sigma Space Corporation)

Visualizer/Animator:
Jesse Allen (Sigma Space Corporation)

Lead Writers:
Robert Simmon (Sigma Space Corporation)
Rebecca E. Lindsey

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA Earth Observatory
Aral Sea abandoned boats photograph courtesy of Ismael Alonso, Copyright 2011

Short URL to share this page:
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10862

Keywords:
SVS >> App
NASA Science >> Earth