The Aral Sea once ranked as the world's fourth-largest lake, covering 68,000 square kilometres between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan until Soviet irrigation projects diverted the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers in the 1960s.
By 2014, the southeastern basin had evaporated entirely, leaving a salt-crusted seabed stretching 150 kilometres from the former shoreline at Muynak. The town's fishing fleet—rusting trawlers that once hauled 40,000 tonnes of bream, carp, and sturgeon annually—now sits 200 kilometres from the nearest water, a monument to one of the century's most comprehensive ecological collapses.
Muynak's ship graveyard anchors every Khiva to Aral Sea day trip, a skeletal armada of twenty-seven vessels scattered across wind-scoured sand. The ships, abandoned between 1982 and 1987 as the harbour dried, retain their Soviet registry numbers and winch assemblies, oxidised into terracotta and bronze by salt spray and desert heat. A regional museum in Muynak, charging a 30,000 UZS conservation fee, houses sepia photographs of the harbour at its 1960 peak, fishing nets knotted from horsehair, and sediment cores documenting salinity levels that climbed from 10 grams per litre to 110 as the sea contracted. The collection contextualises the environmental mechanics: cotton monoculture upstream consumed 90 per cent of the river flow, leaving the Aral to shrink by 90 per cent in volume and fragment into three remnant pools.
The crossing from Khiva to Muynak traverses 450 kilometres of the Kyzylkum Desert, a six-hour drive through Karakalpakstan's gravel plains and saxaul thickets. Nukus, the regional capital at the route's midpoint, holds the Savitsky Museum's collection of 80,000 Russian avant-garde works—Ufimtsev canvases, Komarovskiy constructivist prints—assembled covertly during the Stalin era. Most expeditions pair the museum with the ship graveyard, threading art history and ecological disaster into a single transect. The desert itself, once the Aralo-Caspian Depression's seabed millions of years prior, has reclaimed the lakebed with salt-tolerant halophytes and tamarisk scrub, a vegetation echo of the sea's deep past now mirroring its desiccated present.
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