The Aral Sea was once the fourth largest lake in the world – 26,000 square kilometers. For centuries, the sea and its river deltas sustained settlements of farmers and traders and craftsmen and thinkers along the Silk Road. In the 1960s, Stalin turned his Soviet Central Asian republics into giant cotton plantations. It was an engineering project that diverted such large quantities of water out of the two rivers that the Aral Sea began to dry up. It is considered one of the worst environmental catastrophes of the 20th century, but the problems linked to the dried sea still exist today.
A small...