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The Aral Sea was an endorheic lake lying between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south which began shrinking in the 1960s and had largely dried up by the 2010s. The name roughly translates as "Sea of Islands", referring to over 1,100 islands that had dotted its waters

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In October 1990 Western scientists confirmed the virtual disappearance of the Aral Sea in Soviet Central Asia, formerly the fourth-largest inland sea in the world. The loss of sea water was the result of 60 years of intensive agriculture and pollution by the Soviet authorities.

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The Aral Sea was an endorheic lake between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that began declining in the 1960s and had almost completely dried up by the 2010s. The term "Sea of Islands" approximately translates to "Sea of Islands," referring to the almost 1,100 islands that dot its seas.

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Aral Sea: Man-made environmental disaster - BBC News

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The Aral Sea stands at the boundary between Kazakhstan to the north and Uzbekistan to the south. It was once a large saltwater lake of Central Asia and the world's fourth largest body of inland water.

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Overview:
The Aral Sea began to quickly shrink because of the evaporation of its now unreplenished waters
Location:
Between Uzpakistan and kazakistan

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The Aral Sea was an endorheic lake lying between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south which began shrinking in the 1960s and had largely dried up by the 2010s.

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The average depth was 8.7m in the south and 14m in the north in 2005

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The primary cause behind the shrinking of the Aral Sea is the diversion (for purposes of irrigation) of the main sources of inflowing water, the riverine waters of the Syr Darya (ancient Jaxartes River) in the north and the Amu Darya (ancient Oxus River) in the south, which historically discharged into the Aral Sea.

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Lake "Aral" extends between "Kazakhstan" in the north and "Uzbekistan" in the south, and it was a large lake before most of its waters dried up, and only small springs of water scattered here and there, and the lake began to dry up since the sixties when the Soviet Union began In diverting the rivers that feed it for agricultural purposes, drought has halted fishing activity and increased unemployment in the area surrounding the lake. There are efforts to increase the volume of water in the lake, but it is difficult to restore its original size.

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cause behind the shrinking of the Aral Sea is the diversion of the main sources of inflowing water

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It’s located in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

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The ecosystem of the Aral Sea was destroyed mainly as a result of the increased salinity as well as the testing of weapons and other fertilizer run offs. The salinity of the water in the Aral sea was around 376 g/l by 1990 compared to the 35 g/l salinity of ordinary seawater.16 Sep 2021

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The Aral Sea was an endorheic lake lying between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south which began shrinking in the 1960s and had largely dried up by the 2010s. The name roughly translates as "Sea of Islands", referring to over 1,100 islands that had dotted its waters

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In the 1960s, the Soviet Union undertook a major water diversion project on the arid plains of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The region's two major rivers, fed by snowmelt and precipitation in faraway mountains, were used to transform the desert into farms for cotton and other crops. Before the project, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya rivers flowed down from the mountains, cut northwest through the Kyzylkum Desert, and finally pooled together in the lowest part of the basin. The lake they made, the Aral Sea, was once the fourth largest in the world.

Although irrigation made the desert bloom, it devastated the Aral Sea. This series of images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite documents the changes. At the start of the series in 2000, the lake was already a fraction of its 1960 extent (yellow line). The North Aral Sea (sometimes called the Small Aral Sea) had separated from the South (Large) Aral Sea.

The South Aral Sea had split into eastern and western lobes that remained tenuously connected at both ends. By 2001, the southern connection had been severed, and the shallower eastern part retreated rapidly over the next several years. Especially large retreats in the eastern lobe of the South Aral Sea appear to have occurred between 2005 and 2009, when drought limited and then cut off the flow of the Amu Darya. Water levels then fluctuated annually between 2009 and 2018 in alternately dry and wet years. In 2014, the eastern lobe of the South Aral Sea completely disappeared. Water levels in summer 2018 were not as low as they might have been, following a round of seasonal snowmelt in the spring.

As the Aral Sea has dried up, fisheries and the communities that depended on them collapsed. The increasingly salty water became polluted with fertilizer and pesticides. The blowing dust from the exposed lakebed, contaminated with agricultural chemicals, became a public health hazard. The salty dust blew off the lakebed and settled onto fields, degrading the soil. Croplands had to be flushed with larger and larger volumes of river water. The loss of the moderating influence of such a large body of water made winters colder and summers hotter and drier.

In a last-ditch effort to save some of the lake, Kazakhstan built a dam between the northern and southern parts of the Aral Sea. The Kok-Aral dike and dam, finished in 2005, separates the two water bodies and prevents flow out of the North Aral into the lower-elevation South Aral. The dam has led fisheries in the North Aral to rebound, even as it has limited flow into the South Aral. Between 2005 and 2006, water levels in the North Aral rebounded significantly and very small increases are visible throughout the rest of the time period. The differences in water color are due to changes in sediments and water depth.

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A massive irrigation project has devastated the Aral Sea over the past 50 years. These images show the decline of the Southern Aral Sea in the past decade, as well as the first steps of recovery in the Northern Aral Sea.