The Aral Sea was once the world's fourth largest inland water body. Its waters stretched across 26,000 square miles (67,300 square kilometers). The sea was once ringed with prosperous towns which were supported by a lucrative muskrat pelt industry and thriving fishery that provided the Soviet Union with a sixth of its total fish catch.

The Aral Sea was originally fed by two of Central Asia's greatest rivers, the Amu Darya in the south and the Syr Darya in the north. The former is the longest river in the region, snaking through 1,500 miles (2,414 kilometers) of steppe.

But in the 1960s, the Soviet Union decided to make the steppes bloom. So they built an enormous irrigation network, including 20,000 miles of canals, 45 dams, and more than 80 reservoirs, all to irrigate sprawling fields of cotton and wheat in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. But the system was leaky and inefficient. After several decades, the Amu Darya had lost so much of its flow that it no longer reached the Aral Sea. Today, it ends about 70 miles (110 kilometers) away.

Pictured is the Amu Darya a little ways upstream from where it dries out.

Deprived of a major source of its water, the inland sea shrank rapidly. In just a few decades, the Aral Sea was reduced to a handful of small lakes with a combined volume only one-tenth the original. Evaporation concentrated the salts into the small lakes. Millions of fish died, coastlines receded miles from towns, and those few people who remained were plagued with toxic dust storms, the residue of industrial agriculture and weapons testing in the area.

Related: Read about the legacy of the Aral Sea

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