For decades the shrinking Aral Sea has been the poster child for environmental catastrophe. Behind images of rusty fishing boat shells sitting awkwardly among the sand dunes lies a story of human ...

Tastubek is a small fishing village located on the coast of the Aral Sea. When the waters of the sea receded due to Soviet-era irrigation projects, life here effectively stopped. After the completion ...

Where water once stood is now an arid, dry, open landscape in western Kazakhstan punctuated with low-lying shrubs. Only when you finally reach the Little Aral Sea, known as Kishi Aral, can you feel ...

A generation ago, the vanishing of the Aral Sea became global shorthand for environmental desolation. Today the region has become a test bed for a resilient future. A thermal spring, visited by locals ...

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. But what happens when the learned fisherman finds no fish at all? This has been one of numerous ...

The Aral Sea’s story demonstrates how human actions can profoundly alter natural systems, yet it also shows that determined cooperation can begin to repair environmental damage that once seemed ...

Once the world’s fourth-largest inland sea, the Aral has lost more than 90% of its volume since the 1960s and is now, largely a desert. At the Venice Biennale, a national pavilion will revisit the ...

This story appears in the June 2015 issue of National Geographic magazine. “This is what the end of the world looks like,” says Yusup Kamalov, sweeping his hand toward the scrub-covered desert ...