A man-made disaster

---

The dried up port of Aralsk (Aral) where fishing boats used to dock and unload their turned into a play-ground for children. In the early sixties, when Kazakhstan was still part of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev decided to divert the waters of the Amur Darya and Syr Darya rivers to bolster the cotton plantations in Uzbekistan. The net result was a man-made ecological disaster as the Aral Sea all but dried

---

Size: 6240px × 4160px
Location: Kazakhstan, Aral
Photo credit: © Kim GORDON-BATES / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No

Keywords: abandoned, aral, aralsk, catastrophe, communism, desert, disaster, dried, ecology, economics, environment, geography, kazakhstan, man-, port, sea, soviet, union