Once one of the worlds largest inland lakes, Asia's Aral Sea has evaporated into desert, dried by Soviet era irrigation plans. One village in Kazakhstan sits on the shrinking shores of the Aral Sea.

ASTANA – The volume of the Northern Aral Sea has reached 24.1 billion cubic meters, surpassing the targets set in ...

There has been plenty of negative news of late about the damage done by global warming in Kazakhstan, but the Ministry of Water Resources recently had a positive tidbit to announce: the Northern Aral ...

Tastubek is a small fishing village located on the coast of the Aral Sea. When the waters of the sea receded due to Soviet-era irrigation projects, life here effectively stopped. After the completion ...

MUYNAK, Uzbekistan (AP) — Toxic dust storms, anti-government protests, the fall of the Soviet Union — for generations, none of it has deterred Nafisa Bayniyazova and her family from making a living ...

This story appears in the June 2015 issue of National Geographic magazine. “This is what the end of the world looks like,” says Yusup Kamalov, sweeping his hand toward the scrub-covered desert ...

When Maria Zadneprovskaya first saw the Aral Sea in 2021, she was overcome by a raw, deep sadness. "It felt like a real catastrophe," says the environmental expert, walking across the dried seabed, ...

The Aral Sea straddles the border of the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. It was once one of the world's largest lakes, but after years of being drained to irrigate crops, it ...