Uzbekistan

In Uzbekistan, a sea has turned into sand.

The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth-largest lake. From the 1960s, large amounts of water from the two rivers that fed it were diverted to irrigate cotton fields in the desert. The sea shrank year after year.

What remained was the Aralkum, a new desert of sand, salt and old lake sediment — and rusting fishing boats left stranded in a sea of sand.

When the wind rises, material from the former seabed is lifted and blown across villages and farmland. To keep the sand in place, people are now planting saxaul directly on the dried seabed. Its long roots bind the ground and slow what would otherwise travel with the wind.

A sea disappeared within a few decades. Now people are trying to stop its bottom from following.