Aral Sea, once filled with blue fish, has completely disappeared.
The world is experiencing the devastating impact of rising temperature due to climate change. January 2024 is the second consecutive month when the global temperature was above the normal mark. In fact, this pushed the global average temperature over 1.5 degree threshold for first time ever. But more than a decade before such adverse impacts became evident, the world saw an entire sea disappear. The water body was called Aral Sea, a land locked lake between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which largely dried up by 2010.
Aral Sea was the fourth-largest body of inland water in the world with an area of 68,000 square kilometres. It began shrinking in the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects.
NASA's Earth Observatory posted a detailed analysis of the reason behind Aral Sea's disappearance. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union undertook a major water diversion project on the arid plains of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan for the purpose of irrigation. The region's two major rivers - Syr Darya in the north and the Amu Darya in the south - were used to transform the desert into farms for cotton and other crops.
They were fed by snow and precipitation in faraway mountains and cut through the Kyzylkum Desert and finally discharged into the Aral Sea. Though irrigation bloomed due to the major project, it devastated the water body.
Encyclopaedia Britannica said that Aral Sea was formed toward the end of the Neogene Period (between 23 and 2.6 million years ago) when the two rivers changed course and maintained a high water level in the inland lake.
At its peak, the Aral Sea stretched for almost 270 miles (435 km) from north to south and over 180 miles (290 km) from east to west. But after the water of the rivers was diverted to create a farmland, the inflow depleted severely and the entire sea evaporated.
In a last-ditch effort to save some of the lake, Kazakhstan built a dam between the northern and southern parts of the Aral Sea. But it's nearly impossible to restore the water body to its full glory now.