Aral Sea
#21 in WorldMultiple
1 / 12
© NASA. Collage by Producercunningham.Public Domain
Area
8K km²
Coordinates
44.9000, 59.4000
Category
lakes
Overview
Once the world's fourth largest lake - now largely dry, one of Earth's greatest environmental disasters.
About
The Aral Sea was an endorheic salt lake lying between Kazakhstan to its north and Uzbekistan to its south, which began shrinking in the 1960s and had largely dried up into desert by 2007. It was in the Aktobe and Kyzylorda regions of Kazakhstan and the Karakalpakstan autonomous region of Uzbekistan. The name roughly translates from Mongolic and Turkic languages to "Sea of Islands", a reference to the large number of islands that once dotted its waters.
More about Aral Sea
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article “Aral Sea”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Read full article