00:00The Aral Sea was an ender-hike lake lying between Kazakhstan in the north and
00:03Uzbekistan in the south which began shrinking in the 1960s and had largely dried up by the 2010s.
00:10The name roughly translates as Sea of Islands, referring to over 1,100 islands that had dotted
00:16its waters The Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest lake in the world, has shrunk by nearly 90 percent
00:21due to water diversion for irrigation projects during the Soviet era. Due to the devastation
00:26to the fishing industry, many of the lakeside towns were abandoned, and rusted fishing boats
00:31can still be seen in what is now a dry desert landscape. The rivers flowing into the Aral
00:36Sea were diverted for cotton fields, but much of the water seeped into the ground,
00:40never reaching the fields. Increased pesticide use and rising water salinity levels led to a
00:46public health crisis, today, various projects exist to save the smaller,
00:50disconnected lakes that still exist in the Aral Sea Basin.
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