The Aral Sea used to be the fourth-largest lake in the world, but thanks to poor water management, the lake rapidly shrank over only a handful of decades—from larger than the entire state of West Virginia to only 10 percent of its original size.
…
“We have certainly seen declines in lake water level in Lake Mead in the last few decades in response to the long drought in the region. Last year was an exception, but it’s not enough to fully refill the lake,” Tamlin M. Pavelsky, an associate professor of global hydrology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Newsweek.