The Aral Sea has lost roughly 90% of its original volume since 1960, making it one of the most dramatic environmental disasters in modern history. Once covering about 68,000 square kilometers, slightly larger than West Virginia, the sea has shrunk to about 10% of that size and split into two separate bodies of water: the North Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and the South Aral Sea in Uzbekistan.
Why the Sea Disappeared
Starting in the 1960s, the Soviet Union diverted the two rivers feeding the Aral Sea, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, to irrigate vast cotton fields across Central Asia. The region became one of the world’s largest cotton producers, but the cost was staggering. With most of its incoming freshwater rerouted into irrigation canals, the sea began to evaporate faster than it could refill. By the 1980s, the water level had dropped so far that the single body of water split in two. The eastern lobe of the South Aral Sea has periodically dried out entirely in recent years, leaving behind a vast, toxic desert.
A New Desert Where Water Used to Be
The exposed seabed, now called the Aralkum Desert, stretches across tens of thousands of square kilometers. This isn’t ordinary sand. For decades, agricultural runoff carried pesticides and industrial chemicals into the sea, where they settled into the lakebed sediment. Now that the water is gone, wind picks up that contaminated dust and carries it across the region.
Studies have found elevated concentrations of DDT, arsenic, mercury, and other organochlorine pesticides in the blood, urine, and breast milk of people living near the former shoreline. Children in the towns of Aralsk and Akchi in Kazakhstan have been tested for mercury, arsenic, and several industrial pollutants. Maternal and infant mortality, childhood growth delays, liver disorders, and respiratory problems have all increased significantly in the region compared to pre-1960 levels. The health damage comes not just from the dust but also from deteriorating drinking water quality as the remaining water sources have become increasingly contaminated.
Collapse of the Fishing Industry
The Aral Sea once supported a thriving commercial fishing economy. From the 1930s through the mid-1960s, annual catches ranged from 200,000 to 400,000 centners (roughly 20,000 to 40,000 metric tons) per year. The Muynak Fish Canning Plant, once a major employer in Uzbekistan’s Karakalpakstan region, processed catches that peaked at 263,000 centners in 1938.
The decline was steep and irreversible. By 1972, the annual catch had fallen to 85,700 centners. By 1979, it was 21,200. The last commercial haul, a mere 530 centners, was recorded in 1983. After that, fishing in the Aral Sea stopped completely. The port town of Muynak, once on the water’s edge, now sits more than 100 kilometers from the nearest shoreline. Rusting fishing boats half-buried in sand have become a stark symbol of the disaster.
What Happened to the Wildlife
The Aral Sea originally supported 20 native fish species. As salinity skyrocketed in the shrinking water, freshwater fish couldn’t survive. Two species are now classified as extinct: the ship sturgeon and the Aral trout. Both disappeared after 1979. Even after some water returned to parts of the northern sea through restoration efforts, these two species couldn’t recover because dams had permanently blocked their migration routes to spawning areas in the rivers. By the early 1980s, freshwater fish had vanished entirely from the sea.
The North Aral Sea Recovery
The story isn’t entirely bleak. Kazakhstan, with World Bank funding, completed the Kok-Aral Dam in 2005 to trap water from the Syr Darya in the smaller North Aral Sea. The strategy worked. Water levels rose, salinity dropped, and some fish populations returned. Local fishing communities have partially revived around the North Aral, though catches remain far below historical levels.
The South Aral Sea, which depends on the Amu Darya, has had no comparable intervention. Uzbekistan’s cotton industry still consumes enormous volumes of water from that river, and the southern portion continues to shrink. Its salinity has risen far beyond what any freshwater species can tolerate.
Planting Trees on the Seabed
To fight the toxic dust storms blowing off the Aralkum Desert, Uzbekistan and the United Nations Development Programme launched the “Green Aral Sea” initiative. The project plants saxaul trees, a hardy desert species, directly on the dry seabed to stabilize the soil and reduce airborne dust. Over five years of implementation, 823,000 trees have been planted across 658 hectares. Planting has accelerated in recent years, with 200,000 trees covering 200 hectares in 2024 alone. The effort is meaningful but small relative to the vast area of exposed seabed.
Water Supply Is Getting Worse
The rivers that once fed the Aral Sea originate in glaciers high in the Tian Shan and Pamir mountain ranges. Those glaciers are retreating. Climate projections suggest that glacier melt will actually increase river flow temporarily, with runoff peaking around 2040. After that, as the glaciers shrink further, the water supply drops. The timing of peak runoff is also shifting about one month earlier due to warmer temperatures causing earlier snowmelt, which means less water available during the hot summer months when irrigation demand is highest.
This creates a cruel timeline. The countries sharing the Aral Sea basin, primarily Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, face a temporary window of relatively stable water supply before a long-term decline sets in. Combined with rising temperatures that increase evaporation and crop water demand, the pressure on what remains of the Aral Sea will only intensify. Without major changes to irrigation practices across the region, the South Aral Sea has no realistic path to recovery.