Imagine living near the seaside your whole life, only for the ocean to literally walk away overnight. Residents along the Aral Sea have had decades to watch this environmental nightmare happen before ...

Tastubek is a small fishing village located on the coast of the Aral Sea. When the waters of the sea receded due to Soviet-era irrigation projects, life here effectively stopped. After the completion ...

This story appears in the June 2015 issue of National Geographic magazine. “This is what the end of the world looks like,” says Yusup Kamalov, sweeping his hand toward the scrub-covered desert ...

The coastline vanished from his village long before Kenzhetay Akseitov was born. With it went the fishing that had once been the backbone of the local economy, leaving the nearby salt works as the ...

The Aral Sea’s story demonstrates how human actions can profoundly alter natural systems, yet it also shows that determined cooperation can begin to repair environmental damage that once seemed ...

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. But what happens when the learned fisherman finds no fish at all? This has been one of numerous ...