Aral Sea archaeological survey: Golden Horde found settlements on former seabed

The receding waters of the Aral Sea have exposed more than the rusted hulls of abandoned ships. As the shoreline retreats, it has unveiled ruins of ancient cities and human settlements that remained submerged for centuries, turning an environmental disaster into a significant archaeological investigation. A Shifting Landscape Once the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, the Aral Sea began a rapid decline in the 1960s due to aggressive water diversion from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. However, this retreat revealed that the sea's known boundaries were relatively recent, forming only around the 15th or 16th centuries. Prior to this, the seabed was habitable land with developed infrastructure. Geologist Aleksey Trofimov notes that the landscape is not static; areas currently identified as the seabed were once fertile valleys. Evidence of ancient irrigation systems suggests that early populations adapted to previous climatic shifts, though the current scale of disappearance is driven by human activity rather than natural cycles.