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 ...

Where water once stood is now an arid, dry, open landscape in western Kazakhstan punctuated with low-lying shrubs. Only when you finally reach the Little Aral Sea, known as Kishi Aral, can you feel ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Multiple international actors have become involved in helping Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan alleviate the devastating consequences of one of the worst human-made environmental disasters across the Central ...