The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission shows us what is left of the Aral Sea, once the fourth largest lake in the world.
Straddling the border between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south, the Aral Sea was once a large inland water body in Central Asia. In 1960, the lake covered an area of about 68,000 square kilometers–twice the size of Belgium.
Before the 1950s, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya rivers carried fresh mountain water into this temperate oasis, situated in a mostly arid region. However, in the 1960s, the rivers were diverted to irrigate cotton fields across the region and since then the Aral Sea has shrunk dramatically.
By the end of the 1980s, the Aral Sea had split into two bodies of water–the Large Aral shared by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and a smaller almost unconnected lake to the north, the Small Aral, in Kazakhstan. By 2000, the Large Aral had further split into two.
In this image from March 18, 2025, we can see how the western lobe has reduced substantially, while the eastern lobe has virtually dried up. As the Aral Sea evaporated, it left behind a zone of dry, salty terrain. This appears in the image as a whitish area over the former lakebed, now the Aralkum Desert, Earth’s youngest desert.
The retreat of the waters devastated the area’s thriving fishing industry and altered the regional microclimate. Violent sandstorms have now become an annual occurrence, transporting tonnes of salt and sand from the dried-up lakebed across hundreds of kilometers. This causes severe health problems for the local population and makes regional winters colder and summers hotter.
Image Credit: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2025), processed by ESA
