14th in a Series of PODCASTs on Forgotten History.
To answer the question, it was the Soviet Union, that’s who. The Aral Sea is actually situated in Central Asia, between Northern Uzbekistan and Southern Kazakhstan. Once the fourth largest freshwater lake in the world, the vanishing Aral Sea is now nearly empty, thanks to a decades-old, Soviet-begun desert irrigation program.
https://paulwandrews.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/aral-sea.m4a