Shrinking of the Aral Sea
The world's fourth-largest lake is drained for cotton
From the 1960s Soviet authorities diverted the Amu Darya and Syr Darya to irrigate cotton, and the Aral began to shrink. By the 2000s it had split into several lakes and lost about 90% of its area; fishing collapsed, and winds carry salt and pesticides from the exposed bed. A Kazakh dam built in 2005 partly restored the Small Aral.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 21 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 13 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 12 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 11 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 20 years later
Europe
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 24 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 19 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 7 years earlier
- 1957 Treaty of Rome — 3 years earlier
- 1961 Berlin Wall built — 1 year later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 19 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 18 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 15 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 3 years earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 1 year later
Middle East
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 12 years earlier
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 12 years earlier
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 7 years earlier
- 1958 14 July Revolution in Iraq — 2 years earlier
- 1960 Founding of OPEC — same year
Africa
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 4 years earlier
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 2 years earlier
- 1960 Year of Africa — same year
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 3 years later
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 7 years later
Americas
- 1959 Cuban Revolution — 1 year earlier
- 1960 Great Chilean earthquake — same year
- 1969 Moon landing — 9 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 10 years later
- 1983 ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 23 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 24 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 19 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 18 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 6 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 1 year earlier
Alive at the time
- Winston Churchill (aged 86)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 79)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 71)
- Mao Zedong (aged 67)
- Georgy Zhukov (aged 64)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 42)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 31)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 30)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 26)
- Bertrand Russell (aged 88)