Sorry, that was the Caspian sea.
And I do mean “was”. It’s like, gone man.
Nope, Caspian sea is fine. Lot of oil there and that’s been an environmental issue they way they do it, but the Aral sea is the one with ships high and dry.
They built an irrigation canal and it drained it.
Sort of the reverse of what we did in the Salton Sea in California. The engineers did the canal thing and accidently filled a basin with brine water runoff and couldn’t stop it.