The Aral Sea was a closed off drainage basin and one of the largest lakes in the world. It sat between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south. Its watershed area covered Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. It once covered 68,000 square kilometres but has been shrinking since the 1960s because of diversion for Soviet irrigation projects. By 2007, the lake had split into four smaller lakes, but satellite images taken in August 2014 show that the eastern portion of the Aral Sea is completely devoid of water. It is now referred to as the Aralkum desert. Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General called the seas disappearance one of the planets worst environmental disasters. Ecosystems have been completely destroyed, people who once fished for a living are now without jobs and the receding tide has left behind a history worth of toxic chemicals from weapons testing and fertilizer run off. The infant mortality rate has skyrocketed and tuberculosis has become a common illness in the region. Saving the Aral Sea falls in the hands of the five countries mentioned above. Work on the North Aral Sea included dam construction that minimally revived a fishing economy and created rain clouds. The South Aral Sea has been left to dry up and Uzbekistan is planning for oil exploration in the dry seabed.
