A port city stranded in the desert — the rusting hulks of the Aral Sea fleet lie beached on what was once the bottom of a sea
Muynak was once a thriving Uzbek fishing port on the shores of the Aral Sea, a body of water that ranked as the world's fourth largest lake. Soviet-era irrigation projects diverted the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers that fed it, and by the 2000s the southern Aral Sea had essentially vanished — the shoreline retreated over 100km, leaving Muynak stranded in salt desert. The haunting Ship Graveyard on the city's edge — two dozen rusting fishing trawlers resting on cracked salt flats where the lake bed used to be — has become one of the most photographed images of human-caused ecological catastro…
The Aral Sea was stable at roughly 68,000 square kilometres from antiquity until the 1960s, fed by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers from the Pamirs and Tian Shan. The Soviet decision in 1918 to divert both rivers for cotton irrigation was implemented at scale from the 1960s onward; the lake began shrinking visibly by the late 1970s. By 1989 it had split into a northern (Kazakhstan) and southern (Uzbekistan) portion. The northern section has partially recovered after Kazakhstan built the Kokaral Dam in 2005; the southern section is largely gone. The Uzbek government has planted saxaul trees…