Aral Sea, Central Asia

Once the fourth-largest lake in the world, the Aral Sea has become the defining image of environmental catastrophe. Soviet-era irrigation projects diverted the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers to feed cotton fields in the desert. The lake began to shrink. And it never stopped.

Landsat satellites have documented this transformation since the 1980s. The pale shorelines visible in these images mark where water once stood, a ghost outline of a body of water that sustained fishing communities and moderated the regional climate for millennia.

By 2024, the eastern basin has almost completely dried up. The exposed seabed, now called the Aralkum Desert, sends toxic dust storms laden with salt and pesticide residue across the region. What remains is a fraction of what existed half a century ago.

It is a story written in salt and sand, visible from any orbit overhead.