Satellite images from NASA show that one of the world’s largest inland bodies of water, the Aral Sea in Central Asia, has been shrinking since 1960 and is almost completely dried up.
The Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest lake in the world, but it has been shrinking since the 60’s when the Soviet Union started diverting their waters to irrigate the surrounding areas.
The shrinkage has been captured by a series of shocking photos from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.
When the series of pictures began in 2000, there was two smaller bodies of water instead of a single huge body of water. By this year, the sea is almost completely gone.