Aral sea in 2003 and 2007:
This is what I call a visible change. I took the 2007 picture from Google Maps. See also Reviving Aral Sea, a story about the partial undoing of communism.
A 30-feet sea level rise in a few years seems to be a better thing than a centrally organized environmentalist attempt to make the a huge territory more friendly to life and agriculture.
The Aral Sea has been used as a rather extreme laboratory. The salinity in the ocean is 3.5 percent. In the Aral Sea, it was about 35 percent. ;-) This is the approximate value of salinity where problems start to be apparent. Nevertheless, the drought itself was still higher a problem than the huge salinity.
