Drying of the Aral Sea. Cows eating hay on a dried seabed,next to abandoned,beached ships. This area is near the former port of Muynak,Uzbekistan. This port used to be on the shores of the Aral Sea,in Central Asia. The Aral Sea was once one of the world's largest inland seas,with a thriving fishing industry,but in the 1930s the Soviet Union dug canals that diverted the sea's major rivers to irrigate cotton fields. From the 1960s,the sea started to shrink,and by 2004 some 75 percent of the sea's area had been lost. Ships lie beached on the dry seabed,and the people in the area struggle to survive by farming livestock in a salt-contaminated desert landscape |