Once thriving, the vast Asian lake was drained for irrigation.

In 2000 (left), Asia’s Aral Sea had already shrunk to a fraction of its 1960 extent (black line). Further irrigation and dry conditions in 2014 (right) caused the sea’s eastern lobe to completely dry up for the first time in 600 years.

Once the fourth largest lake in the world, Central Asia’s shrinking Aral Sea has reached a new low, thanks to decades-old water diversions for irrigation and a more recent drought. Satellite imagery released this week by NASA shows that the eastern basin of the freshwater body is now completely dry.

“It is likely the first time it has completely dried in 600 years, since medieval desiccation associated with diversion of Amu Darya [river] to the Caspian Sea,” Philip Micklin, an Aral Sea expert and a geographer emeritus from Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, told NASAabout the sea’s eastern basin. (See “Photos: Dried Up Aral Sea Aftermath.”) Read more

Enjoy our fun water facts for kids. Learn how important water is to life on Earth as well its many amazing uses and properties. Read about ice, steam, snow, drinking water, oceans, water pollution, seawater, rivers the water cycle and much more with our huge range of interesting facts about water.

• Water is made up of two elements, hydrogen and oxygen. Its chemical formula is H2O.
• Each molecule of water is made up of two hydrogen atoms bonded to a single oxygen atom.
• The existence of water is essential for life on Earth.
• Water has three different states, liquid, solid and gas.
• The word water usually refers to water in its liquid state.
• The solid state of water is known as ice while the gas state of water is known as steam or water vapor.

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The State Water Resources Control Board today officially launched an effort to encourage K-12 schools in California to have their drinking water tested for lead. As part of the effort, the board’s Division of Drinking Water is issuing amended permits this week that require community water systems to test the schools in their service areas for lead if requested by school officials in writing.

Details are now available on the State Water Board’s website here. Schools covered by the requirement include public, private, charter, magnet and non-public K-12 schools. Preschools and day-care centers are not included.

Water systems that receive a request will have 60 days to make contact with the school to schedule a meeting to develop a sampling plan. Systems will have a total of 90 days from the time the request is received to finalize the sampling plan and conduct sampling at the school. Read more

Climate change-induced changes in snowfall patterns could imperil two billion people who rely on melting snow for their water supply — and developing countries must work to protect citizens from these variations, researchers say.

Out of 421 drainage basins studied in the northern hemisphere, a study published on 12 November identified 32, serving nearly 1.45 billion people, which are most sensitive to these changes because of their high reliance on snowmelt. In these regions, precipitation falling as rain instead of snow due to climate change is likely to decrease the volume of snowpacks, which are natural reservoirs of freshwater.

These snow-sensitive basins include for example the Indus river basin, which is shared between Afghanistan, China, India and Pakistan, says the paper published in Environmental Research Letters. Read more

YOU’VE found the perfect summer cottage in the country. You can bicycle into town. There are a couple of good restaurants. The shops are cute, and your friends are eager to visit. The house passed the usual presale inspection, the closing was a snap, and now you’re moving in and reaching for the kitchen tap to get a glass of water. Read more