All this week, I’m practising three sentence science, as piloted by the online magazine Nautilus.

The shrinking lake starts to disappear completely

Once the world’s fourth largest lake in Central Asia, the 5.5 million year old Aral Sea has been shrinking for decades due to an irrigation project the Soviets started in the 1940s. New satellite images show that this year, for the first time in modern history, the eastern lobe of the South Aral has completely dried out over summer. However, the water levels there continue to fluctuate on a major scale from season to season, thus scientists expect that the drying and rebounding pattern might continue for a while. NASA/Earth Observatory