The Aral Sea Disaster: How the Soviet Union Destroyed the World’s Fourth Largest Lake in 40 Years and What’s Left of It Now

In 1960, the Aral Sea was the fourth largest lake in the world. It covered about 26,300 square miles. It had a thriving fishing industry, a fleet, canneries, beach towns. The rivers flowing into it had been doing so for thousands of years.

By 2007, roughly 90 percent of it was gone. Not from a drought, not from a heat wave. The Soviet government deliberately diverted the rivers that fed it to water cotton fields. They knew what would happen. There is a documented quote from 1964, a Soviet engineer acknowledging the lake was essentially already doomed, explaining that nobody at a lower level of government would dare object to the five-year plan targets. Not even for the fate of the Aral Sea.

Why They Did It

Stalin wanted the Soviet Union to be self-sufficient in cotton. Central Asia was geographically perfect for it: flat, hot, and crossed by two massive rivers, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, that fed the Aral Sea. Starting aggressively in the 1950s, Soviet engineers built a network of irrigation canals diverting river water south and east toward the cotton fields of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Karakum Canal alone stretched nearly 850 miles across the desert.

The system was also extraordinarily wasteful. An estimated 75 percent of the diverted water leaked or evaporated before reaching any field. Nobody cared, because there was so much river water available to waste.

The Aral Sea started shrinking almost immediately. Between 1960 and 1980, the water level dropped 20 meters. The salinity climbed. By the mid-1980s, the fish were dead, the fishing industry was gone, and the ships that had worked the sea were stranded in what had become desert, miles from any water. Those ships are still there. They are now one of the most photographed images in Central Asia.

What It Did to the People

As the sea retreated, it exposed a former seabed covered in salt, fertilizers, and pesticide residues that had accumulated over decades. Wind picked this up and spread it across hundreds of miles. Studies found pesticide residues in the breast milk of women living nearby. Tuberculosis and cancer rates climbed dramatically in the surrounding region. The climate changed, since the moderating influence of a large body of water had disappeared, producing hotter summers and colder winters.

Moynaq, a town in Uzbekistan that had been a prosperous fishing port, found itself 90 miles from water by the early 2000s. The cannery closed. The population collapsed. Soviet authorities classified the health data from the region for years. The people living through the disaster were not told what was happening to them.

What’s Left Now

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the sea had already split into a northern section in Kazakhstan and a southern section in Uzbekistan. The two countries took very different approaches. Kazakhstan built a dam in 2005 with World Bank funding. It worked. The North Aral Sea has partially recovered: water levels are up, fish have returned, and the town of Aralsk is closer to the shoreline than it has been in decades. It is a genuine, if limited, success story.

The South Aral Sea, on the Uzbek side, is essentially gone. The eastern basin dried completely around 2009. Satellite images show a flat expanse of white and brown: the Aralkum Desert, one of the newest deserts on Earth. No serious recovery effort is underway there. The cotton fields that caused the disaster still exist and still need irrigation from the same rivers.