In the 1960ies and in many decades before, the Aral Sea in the former Soviet Union was a desert terminal lake of considerable extent (see the Aral Sea) with thriving fishery and healthy twons and cities at its shores. . Russian engineers, who thought that this lake was an error of nature, decided that the water from the two rivers ... and ... feeding the Lake from the South and Noth-East could be diverted to irrigate the desert in order to plant cotton for export.

In 1986, the Lake had already started to shrink. The breaking up of the Soviet Union accelerated this process because now the emerging countries Kasachstan, Usbekistan, and Turkmenistan without much coordination increased the diversion of water.