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Portrait of a doomed Sea

28 July 2003

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This image of the dying Aral Sea was taken by Envisat's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument on July 9. The whitish land surrounding the remaining waters of the evaporating Aral Sea is a salt-covered dry waterbed known as the Aralkum Desert.

Credits: ESA

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During its heyday the Aral Sea fishing town of Muynak had fishing boats deliver their catch straight to canneries that employed 2,000 people. Now the town is 150 km away from water. As local poverty grows and clean water sources dwindle, Medecins San Frontieres reports that the rate of tuberculosis infection on the dying shores of the Aral Sea is among the highest in the world.

Credits: Petter Hveem - Medecins San Frontieres Norway

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This south-facing image of a much larger Aral Sea was taken by an astronaut on the Space Shuttle Challenger (carrying ESA's Spacelab) in August 1985. See how Vozrozhdeniye Island - once the site of biowarfare experiments - was then still very much cut off from the mainland. Space images have traced the Aral Sea's rapid decline during the past two decades, right up to the latest July 2003 MERIS image, in which half the former lakebed is now dry salty desert and the remaining waters have divided.

Credits: NASA