Once the world's fourth-largest lake, the Aral Sea is now a barren wasteland. This is the story of its dramatic collapse—one of the worst environmental disasters in history.

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. But what happens when ...

The Aral Sea: August 2000 (left) versus August 2016 (right) (NASA Earth Observatory) Note that even the somewhat bigger lake back in 2000 was just a puddle compared to what it was in the 1960s, as ...

What a shrinking sea might teach us on life after environmental disaster. Sixty years ago, the Aral Sea began drying up, leaving salty, barren soil in its wake.

In Uzbekistan, the Aral Sea, one of history’s worst environmental disasters, is now a tourist attraction. What can it teach us about the fate of humankind?

Graves are visible near the dried-up Aral Sea outside Aralsk, Kazakhstan, Monday, July 3, 2023. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi) 31,228 people played the daily Crossword recently. Can you solve it ...

Mr. Dreyer, an editor and writer, wrote from Muynak, Uzbekistan. Walking toward the shrinking remnants of what used to be the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan was like entering hell. All around was a desert ...

Ali Shadilov, left, and Anvar Saimbetov pose in front of an old boat in the area where the Aral Sea once was in Muynak, Uzbekistan, Tuesday, June 27, 2023. The Associated Press interviewed ...

MUYNAK, UZBEKISTAN — Weddings, school dances, music festivals — in small pockets along the Aral Sea, there are signs of life. The Aral has nearly disappeared, and the large communities it once ...

In the past century, the Dead Sea's surface area has shrunk by almost a third. The Jordan River, which once fed the super-salty lake, has been tapped for irrigating and drinking water by Israel ...

From Aral, it’s another 70 kilometers farther to reach the coast of the shrunken sea. In the late 1980s, the shallowing Aral Sea split into two parts.

The Little Aral Sea has lost a third of its water. Kazakh fishermen, whose livelihoods are becoming more difficult every year, worry it may repeat the fate of the Aral Sea, which largely dried up ...