The World's Fourth Largest Lake Just… Stopped Existing

There is a place in Uzbekistan where you can walk out into open desert and find fishing trawlers. Dozens of them. Sitting upright on the sand, in the positions they were floating in when the water left. The town is called Muynak. In the 1960s it was a working port on the fourth largest lake on earth. The water is now around 100 kilometres away. Here's the part most people get wrong: this wasn't an accident. Nobody miscalculated. Soviet planners studied what would happen to the Aral Sea if they diverted the rivers feeding it — and decided the cotton was worth more than the sea. The arithmetic wasn't wrong. The trade did what it was designed to do. The Soviet Union became one of the largest cotton exporters on earth. The problem was everything that wasn't on the page: the leaking canals that drained the sea far harder than the plan required, the decades of pesticide runoff sitting on the seabed, and what happened when that seabed turned into the youngest desert in the world and the wind picked up. This is the full story — and the one part of it that's actually getting better. CHAPTERS 00:00 The ships in the desert 00:40 What the Aral Sea was 01:35 White gold 02:30 Quick word 02:50 The trade 04:00 The retreat 05:15 What was on the seabed 06:40 The forensics 07:40 What it actually means SOURCES NASA Earth Observatory — satellite imagery and analysis of Aral Sea change, 1960s to present World Bank