Soviet engineers diverted two rivers, and the world's fourth-largest lake vanished

In the 1960s, Soviet planners diverted the rivers feeding the Aral Sea to irrigate cotton fields across the Central Asian desert. Cut off from its water supply, the lake lost roughly 90% of its volume over the following decades, splitting into shrunken remnants and leaving fishing fleets stranded on dry, salt-crusted seabed miles from any shoreline.

— NASA Earth Observatory, World of Change: Shrinking Aral Sea