The Aral Sea disaster is the human-caused collapse of what was once the world's fourth-largest lake, in Central Asia, after the Soviet Union diverted its two feeder rivers to irrigate cotton beginning in the 1960s. Over the following decades the sea lost most of its water, broke apart, and left behind toxic dust, a ruined fishing economy, and elevated rates of illness in the communities nearby, though the dust's exact share of that harm remains hard to measure. It is now the standard example of an environmental catastrophe made by human hands, and it is still unfolding.
The rusting hulls of a fishing fleet still sit upright in the sand near Moynaq, dozens of kilometers from the nearest water. They were not wrecked by a storm. The sea beneath them was carried off, canal by canal, to grow cotton in the desert — a loss Soviet planners had been warned of and chose to accept.