Published in Dark Mountain
March 2025
In September 2024 I travelled to Uzbekistan to visit the last pools of a nearly vanished sea. Until the 1960s, the Aral was the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, covering an area of 26,300 square miles. Under Soviet mismanagement, the rivers that formed its only inflows were diverted to irrigate cotton plantations, leading to a catastrophic decline in water levels. The water’s salinity increased, causing a mass die-off of fish. Islands became peninsulas. Landmasses merged. Fishing towns and villages became stranded miles from the nearest coast. Today Uzbekistan’s Aral Sea has shrunk to a tenth of its former size, and – despite a partial resurrection in neighbouring Kazakhstan – is expected to disappear within the next few decades. The Aral became a ‘sacrifice zone’ for economic development. It is considered one of the worst ecocides in history.
I came to the sacrifice zone expecting to find a story of loss, and, of course, I did. But I also found stories I didn’t expect: flickerings of eternal flames, the burial place of the first human, the birthplace of apocalypse, adaptation and renewal. These pictures chart some of these findings in the changing lands around.
Ruins
On the edge of the Kyzylkum Desert in western Uzbekistan stands the ruined Zoroastrian city of Gyaur-Kala. Its name, coined by Arab invaders, means ‘Fortress of the Infidels’. It is also known as ‘Fortress of the Fire-Worshippers’.
Fire is a symbol of purity in the Zoroastrian faith, with eternal sacred flames kept burning in fire temples. Zoroastrianism is considered the world’s oldest ‘apocalyptic’ religion, in which the arc of history bends not towards continuity, but towards the final showdown of the end of days. Thousands of years ago, the arid lands between here and Iran – lands that are soaked in fossil fuels – somehow became the cradle of apocalyptic thinking.
Countdown
Opposite Guar-Kala is a city of the dead: the sprawling necropolis of Mizdarkhan. One ruined mausoleum dedicated to a Sufi saint – rumoured to be built on the burial place of Adam, the first man – is known as the Apocalypse Clock. According to tradition, one brick falls from it every year. The tumbling of these bricks counts down to the end of the world.
When the last brick falls, the apocalypse will come.
Tideline
A hundred miles to the north, the apocalypse has come already. What remains of Uzbekistan’s portion of the Aral is now little more than a narrow lake stretching north into Kazakhstan. The rapid shrinking of the sea has led to extremes of climate change: the summers are hotter, the winters are colder, and the region is wracked by drought. Maelstroms of saline dust, laced with carcinogenic particles, are lifted into the atmosphere by the scouring winds and carried into Russia and across Central Asia.
On what was once the island of Vozrozhdeniya (‘Resurrection’), the residue of biological weapons from a Soviet testing base – including bubonic plague bacilli and anthrax spores – is suspected to have leaked into the ground. In 1988, a herd of 50,000 saiga antelope that were grazing in the region died within an hour. Saiga, once abundant here, are now critically endangered. The local Karakalpak population suffers from unusually high rates of cancer and respiratory disease, and the once-thriving fishing industry has collapsed.
Seashells
The exposed seabed of the Aral is now the Aralkum, with the dubious distinction of being the world’s youngest desert. Littered with millions of bleached seashells, it stretches for thousands of square miles and is growing year by year as the water shrinks. Even in this place of death, however, are signs of adapting life: the new ecosystem is being colonised by a hardy shrub called saxaul. Saxaul can grow to the height of small trees, and its roots fix sandy soil in place, reducing the amount of polluted dust blown into the atmosphere. Slowly, the yellow of the desert is turning green.
Rust
A popular stop for ‘last chance’ or ‘disaster’ tourists, the ship graveyard at Muynak – once a thriving fishing port – has become an icon of environmental disaster. The image of rusting trawlers beached on dunes of pale sand attracts visitors from around the world, and the site now hosts an annual electronic music festival. From Muynak’s outskirts you can walk for hours across the new desert, as dust devils whirl like dervishes on the horizon. The journey from here to the nearest coast — only possible in a four-wheel-drive vehicle over rutted dirt roads — takes around eight hours.
Extremophiles
The children of the last Aral fishmen — shown here helping dig our vehicle out of soft sand — have found a new way to make a living on the sea’s retreating shores: harvesting dormant Artemia eggs to be sold as fish food. Artemia, or brine shrimp, are a species of extremophile that thrives in highly toxic environments. They are better known as ‘sea monkeys’, magically reanimating when added to water. In the 1960s they were originally marketed as ‘Instant Life’. Both the shrimp and their human harvesters tell a story of adaptation in a place most other beings struggle to survive in.
Bodies
Visitors are invited to swim in the last of the Aral Sea, but due to the high salinity all you can do is bob around on a kind of liquid matress. The water is blood-warm, as slick as glycerine. Thousands of tiny Artemia bodies wriggle around you in the brine. Getting to and from the water means trudging through grey, stinking mud. The receding shoreline smells like a decomposing body.
Flares
The exposure of the seabed has led to another adaptation, in the form of a rush for fossil fuels. Under the sand lies an estimated 60 trillion cubic feet of gas and 1.7 billion tonnes of oil, and the nearby Central Asia-Centre pipeline is conveniently placed to carry gas to Russia. The pipeline is controlled by Gazprom, the Russian state energy corporation. The exploitation of these reserves is a government priority.
The water is gone but carbon flows, exacerbating climate collapse. In place of Zoroastrian fire temples there are now gas flares.
Salt
South of the Aralkum lie the remnants of another sea: the Barsa-Kelmes salt flats, deposited 50 million years ago by the vanishing of the Tethys Ocean, which stretches across the desert for hundreds of square miles. The sodium in the ground rises to the surface to form salt crystals, a process of silent and continual regeneration.
The name Barsa-Kelmes, which comes from Kazakh, means ‘place of no return’.
Beacon
On a mound at the top of the Mizdarkhan necropolis stands a wooden edifice containing kindling. A cosmological rival to the nearby burial place of Adam, this is the mythical grave of Gayōmart — the first human, neither woman nor man — who was created from mud by the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda. Despite signs warning against the lighting of candles, the hanging of ribbons, the worship of tombs and other un-Islamic practices, these older religious traditions are still carried on today. Livestock are driven around the hill seven times to ward off disease, and women roll down it seven times as a fertility ritual.
The structure resembles a beacon, a reference to the sacred flame. Beacons are lit to celebrate and to warn of impending disaster.
Bricks
All around Mizdarkhan are mud bricks stacked in sevens, an auspicious number both in Zoroastrianism and Islam. Visiting pilgrims bring them here to pile around the Apocalypse Clock, pushing back the end of days one offering at a time.
The story of the Aral Sea is one of catastrophe. But even after apocalypse, life carries on.