A shrinking life source

The Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest saline lake in the world with an area of approximately 68,000sqkm, stretching from Kazakhstan in the north to Uzbekistan in the south. But in the 1960s, when Soviet rulers diverted the course of the two rivers that fed it to develop cotton production in the region, the waters started to recede. The salinity levels also rose drastically, killing most of the fish that remained. Over the next 50 years, this terrible environmental disaster caused the once-magnificent Aral Sea to shrink to just 10% of its former size.