This before and after composition shows the dramatic retreat of the Aral Sea shoreline from 2006 to 2009, which appears to have shrunk at the eastern end by 80% in just three years. Once the world's fourth-largest inland body of water but now a byword for ecological calamity, the Aral Sea has been retreating over the last 50 years after rivers that fed it were diverted for Soviet cotton irrigation projects
Photograph: Envisat/ESA
The Guardian
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