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Water flows from the heart-shaped northern lobe of the Aral Sea in Central Asia, as seen in a recently released picture taken by the ESA/NASA Landsat 5 satellite. Once the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, the Aral Sea has been shrinking over the past 50 years as water has been diverted for irrigation.

The whitish area surrounding the lake is a vast salt plain, now called the Aralkum Desert, left behind by the evaporating sea.

Via Green Consciousness