🚢 Ships of the Desert (Aral Sea) 🌊

Back in the early 1960s, the Soviet Union started a massive push to turn Central Asia into a major export of cotton, and so began rerouting water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers – two major lifelines running through Central Asia – to irrigate vast cotton fields in some of the driest parts of the region. As a result, the Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest lake in the world, began to shrink rapidly, and nearly 90% of its surface area is gone today, replaced by barren desert. The collapse of the lake destroyed local ecosystems and the marine-based economy.
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