The death of what was once the fourth largest lake on Earth - the Aral Sea

NASA recently released a shocking slide show that shows, picture-by-picture, the death of what was once the fourth largest lake on Earth. Known as the Aral Sea, this endothermic lake is now mostly an arid wasteland.

And here it is in 1997, photographed from the Space Shuttle Discovery

Here is the lake in 1985, photographed from the Space Shuttle Challenger

Now, where the majority of the Aral Sea once was, it looks like this

According to NASA, diverting the water and destroying the lake has been, by and large, a disaster:

As the Aral Sea has dried up, fisheries and the communities that depended on them collapsed. The increasingly salty water became polluted with fertilizer and pesticides. The blowing dust from the exposed lakebed, contaminated with agricultural chemicals, became a public health hazard.

The salty dust blew off the lakebed and settled onto fields, degrading the soil. Croplands had to be flushed with larger and larger volumes of river water. The loss of the moderating influence of such a large body of water made winters colder and summers hotter and drier.