World's Fourth-Largest Lake Nearly Dried Up

What was once the fourth largest lake in the world is now nearly dried up and disappeared, according to recently released NASA satellite images.

Over the last 14 years, the Aral Sea in Central Asia has been shrinking, the result of a major water diversion project by the Soviet Union in the 1960s.

The once-expansive body of water, which stretched for 26,300 square miles, now appears bone dry, except along the edges.

"This is the first time the eastern basin has completely dried in modern times," Philip Micklin, a geographer emeritus from Western Michigan University and an Aral Sea expert, told NASA's Earth Observatory web page.

Soviet engineers began diverting Amu Darya and the Syr Darya - the region's two major rivers - to irrigate surrounding areas and transform the deserts of Kazakhstan, Uzbekisan and Turkmenistan into farm land. Consequently, most of the water ended up being soaked up by the parched ground and wasted.

The changes are dramatically documented in a series of images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite.

By the year 2000, when this sequence of satellite photos began, the lake had already separated into two smaller portions: the North (Small) Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and the South (Large) Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. The South Aral then further split into western and eastern lobes.

According to Micklin, the lake's dehydration, at least for this year, can be attributed to the lack of rain and snow in the watershed that starts in the distant Pamir Mountains, which has greatly reduced water flow on the Amu Darya. In addition, huge amounts of water continue to be withdrawn for irrigation.

Kazakhstan built a dam in 2005 between the northern and southern part of the lake as a "last-ditch effort" to save the Aral Sea, but it doesn't seem to be working. At this rate, the lake will soon disappear entirely, as Micklin expects "this pattern to continue for some time."

A slideshow of the Aral Sea's disappearance can be seen on NASA's website here.

The Aral Sea is not the only body of water at risk of turning from lapping waters to dry desert, according to Discovery News. China's Poyang Lake, Iran's Lake Oroumieh, and the Dead Sea, bordered by Jordan, Israel and Palestine, are all drying up as well.