Places of silence - The Aral Sea

“The Aral Sea” - Karakalpakstan - Uzbekistan

"Those Who Do Not Learn History Are Doomed To Repeat It."
George Santayana

“The Aral Sea” - Karakalpakstan - Uzbekistan

"In the 1960s, the Soviet Union undertook a major water diversion project on the arid plains of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

The region’s two major rivers, fed by snowmelt and precipitation in faraway mountains, were used to transform the desert into farms for cotton and other crops.

Before the project, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya rivers flowed down from the mountains, cut northwest through the Kyzylkum Desert, and finally pooled together in the lowest part of the basin. The lake they made, the Aral Sea, was once the fourth largest in the world.
As the Aral Sea has dried up, fisheries and the communities that depended on them collapsed. The increasingly salty water became polluted with fertilizer and pesticides. The blowing dust from the exposed lakebed, contaminated with agricultural chemicals, became a public health hazard. The salty dust blew off the lakebed and settled onto fields, degrading the soil.

Croplands had to be flushed with larger and larger volumes of river water.

The loss of the moderating influence of such a large body of water made winters colder and summers hotter and drier."

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/WorldOfChange/AralSea