The Little Aral Sea has lost a third of its water. Kazakh fishermen, whose livelihoods are becoming more difficult every year, worry it may repeat the fate of the Aral Sea, which largely dried up ...

Once Written Off for Dead, the Aral Sea Is Now Full of Life. Thanks to large-scale restoration efforts, the North Aral Sea has seen a resurgence of fish—a boon to the communities that rely on it.

In winter and spring, fish in the Aral Sea are more active and easier to catch in nets. Through the cooler months, a fisherman’s haul also stays fresh longer for transport to city markets.

When the farm boom began in the 1960s, the Aral had a commercial fishery that brought in more than 40,000 tons of fish each year, hauled from the sea by ships more than a hundred feet long.

After the Aral Sea dried up, it devastated the livelihood of locals like Batimova who worked as a researcher for a local fish plant. But a dam completed in 2005 that divided the lake managed to ...

Each frame is a snapshot of the Aral Sea in the month of August since 2000, through 2014. The black outline illustrates where the shoreline used to extend to in 1960. (NASA) ...

Brutal Soviet-era farming practices severely damaged the Aral Sea's delicate ecosystem. Now ecologists are planting saplings in the Aralkum Desert to bring trees to where water once lapped.

By the 2000s, the Aral Sea was roughly 10 percent of its original size. The area’s once-vital fishing industry had been completely eradicated, leaving entire communities unemployed .

Once one of the worlds largest inland lakes, Asia's Aral Sea has evaporated into desert, dried by Soviet era irrigation plans. One village in Kazakhstan sits on the shrinking shores of the Aral Sea.

The Aral Sea’s demise matters to us all. ... Dospanov, an archaeologist who grew up along the Aral’s shores and recalls a “happy life” in his youth, when fishing boats, ...