We previously featured the dying Aral Sea back in January 2006, but since then much of the area has been updated with high resolution satellite imagery. Which means we can now see several ships, abandoned in the middle of a desert, a bit like the one in Close Encounters.

Read our original article for an explanation why these ships are here, and for links to other things to see in the area.

Thanks to Gyorgy Takacs.

Sandwiched between Kazakhstan to the north and Uzbekistan to the south, this is the dying Aral Sea. Wikipedia says:

Since the 1960s the Aral Sea has been shrinking, as the rivers that feed it (the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya) were diverted by the Soviet Union for irrigation.

In 1960, the Aral Sea was the world’s fourth-largest lake, but today it has lost 80% of its volume. You can clearly see how much the water has receeded recently by comparing the satellite image with Google’s own map view (there’s no high-resolution imagery, otherwise we might be able to see some abandoned ships), and even more so by comparing it to this satellite image taken in 1985.

To make matters even worse, the ecosystem of the Aral Sea has been nearly destroyed due to high levels of salinity, industrial projects and fertilizer runoff. Not to mention a biological weapons laboratory on the Vozrozhdeniya Island…

For more information on this fascinating environmental catastrophe, make sure you read the Wikipedia page.

Thanks to Daniel Pereira, Phil Gross and Pablo Bleyer.

This is the super-cool looking Tashkent TV Tower in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Standing at 375 metres, it’s slightly smaller than yesterday’s Central TV Tower, but it’s the tallest structure in central Asia (whatever that means). The tower uses a vertical cantilever structure which makes it look like some sort of gargantuan tripod, and also casts a brilliant shadow.

Note: The thumbnail here is rotated 180 degrees from the original, simply because it looked way cooler the right way up!

Just like the Central TV Tower, the Tashkent Tower has an observation deck (slightly higher at 318 metres) which allows it too, to be a member of the World Federation of Great Towers.

Thanks to Mikhail Kushnir, Pasha M. and Tim, we now have an Uzbekistan category!