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17-year-old Aysulu walks along the dried riverbed of the Amu Darya, near her home in Nukus, Uzbekistan.

Claire Harbage/NPR


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Claire Harbage/NPR

17-year-old Aysulu walks along the dried riverbed of the Amu Darya, near her home in Nukus, Uzbekistan.

Claire Harbage/NPR

In Central Asia, the world’s youngest desert occupies a basin that once held a vast saline lake. The Aral Sea.

Up until the 1960s, the sea spanned more than 26 thousand square miles across two countries. It supported thriving fishing communities along its shores. But then, in the name of progress and development, much of the river water that fed the sea was diverted for agriculture. Now the Aral Sea has all but disappeared, shrunk to about tenth of its original size. The UN Environment Programme has called the Aral Sea’s destruction quote “one of the most staggering disasters of the 20th century.”

On this episode of The Sunday Story, Above The Fray Fellow Valerie Kipnis takes us to the Aral Sea to try to understand what went wrong and whether anything can be done to save the little water that’s left.

This episode was produced by Justine Yan and edited by Jenny Schmidt. It was engineered by Gilly Moon.

We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email at TheSundayStory@npr.org.

Listen to Up First on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.



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