A lake that used to be the fourth-largest in the world is nearly completely dried up, according to recently released NASA images.
The side-by-side images of Central Asia's Aral Sea in 2000 and 2014 are striking.
Starting in the 1960s, the Soviet Union had started diverting water from the regions of Kazakhstan, Uzbekisan and Turkmenistan.
'Although irrigation made the desert bloom, it devastated the Aral Sea,' according to NASA.
When the first image was taken, the Aral Sea had already only a fraction of what it was decades ago, NASA says.
The lake's disappearance devastated fishing communities, and the remaining water became so polluted it was a public health hazard, according to the space agency.
Kazakhstan built a dam in 2005 between the northern and southern part of the lake as a 'last-ditch effort' to save the Aral Sea.
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Entities 0 Name: Aral Sea Count: 4 1 Name: NASA Count: 3 2 Name: Kazakhstan Count: 2 3 Name: Turkmenistan Count: 1 4 Name: Central Asia Count: 1 5 Name: Uzbekisan Count: 1 6 Name: Soviet Union Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/1nH4b2U Title: Sea change: Satellite photos show world's fourth-largest lake disappearing Description: The Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest lake in the world, is nearly gone. Satellite images released by NASA this week show half of the inland lake that spans the Kazakhstan-Uzbekistan border in Central Asia are almost totally dry. "For the first time in modern history, the eastern basin of the South Aral Sea has completely dried," NASA said in a release.
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