Aralsk and the sea that came back

Aralsk was a fishing port. Then the Soviet planners turned the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya out into the desert to grow cotton, and from the 1960s the Aral Sea drained: 68,000 square kilometres in 1960, the third largest lake on the planet, down to 28,687 by 1998, down to a tenth of its size and split into four separate lakes by 2007, with the eastern basin completely dry in 2014. Moynaq on the Uzbek side employed about 30,000 people in fishing and now sits 30 to 90 km from any water with the boats lying on the dust where they stopped. The part worth coming for is on the Kazakh side. Kazakhstan built the Kokaral dyke, finished in August 2005, to hold the northern lobe. The water came up, the salinity dropped from 30 grams a litre to 8, freshwater fish returned and so did the boats. It is the only piece of this story with a good ending.