In the middle of Central Asia sits a desert full of shipwrecks, hundreds of miles from any coastline — rusting fishing boats stranded on cracked, dry seabed where one of the world’s largest lakes used to be, before Soviet planners diverted the rivers that fed it

The nearest shoreline sits more than 100 kilometres away, across a salt flat that used to be seabed. By 2000 it had split into a northern and a southern basin, and the southern basin had split again into two lobes. The summer a whole lobe vanishedIn August 2014, the eastern lobe of the South Aral stopped existing. Stop northern water bleeding away into a basin already written off, and see what happens. Survival depends almost entirely on rain, and rain in Karakalpakstan has been miserable.