Left - aerial of the Aral Sea in 1989. Right - in 2008.

Once one of the world's largest inland seas and home to thousands of species, in under 20 years the Aral Sea has shrunk to ten percent of its original size and is so salty that barely any life form remains. The Russians were taught to believe that the sea was an "error of nature" and therefore pointless, but as our Observer points out, the real catastrophe was man-made.

Once a vast stretch of water lying between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, the Aral Sea covered 68,000 squared kilometres of water; placing it in fourth place on the world's largest inland saline bodies of water. For the best part of the past century, inhabitants around the Aral Sea thrived on the fishing industry, supplying the former USSR with 20 percent of its fish products. The Aral Sea's fate was sealed as early as 1918, however, when the Soviet authorities decided to divert two rivers that supplied the sea towards a neighbouring Uzbek desert in order to turn the region into one of the biggest raw cotton producers. Construction of the canals began in the 1940s, and although the USSR did succeed in growing cotton and rice out of desert land, by the beginning of the 1960s the sea's water level had started to fall. The lake since split in two, and then three. This year, one of the three dried up completely, leaving only 6,000 squared kilometres of water left in Kazakhstan, where efforts by the government maintain the remaining northern lake.

Images taken from NASA's Earth Observatory website. The first was taken in 2000, the second, in 2009.