#ecological disaster

• Aral — The Aral Sea; a former endorheic lake of massive proportions located in Central Asia, between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Once the fourth-largest lake in the world, it dried up almost completely starting in the 1960s due to the massive diversion of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers for cotton crop irrigation during the Soviet era, becoming the largest man-made ecological disaster in contemporary history.