A dozen rusting hulks sit where the Aral Sea used to be — the most visceral monument to an environmental catastrophe that was entirely man-made and almost entirely predictable. The Soviet irrigation schemes that drained the sea to grow cotton in the Central Asian desert were known to be destroying the Aral as early as the 1960s; the decision to continue them anyway is one of the more dispiriting episodes in the history of Soviet planning.
The ships are now some 150 km from the water's edge. The ground around them is the Aralkum — the new desert that formed as the sea retreated — cracked clay and salt flats stretching to every horizon. The scale of the emptiness is difficult to convey in photographs. You need to stand in it to understand what was lost.