From about 1960, Soviet irrigation schemes diverted the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers to support cotton cultivation in Central Asia. The Aral Sea shrank dramatically, leaving salt flats, poisoned dust, ruined fisheries, and damaged communities. It became one of the world's most notorious land-use catastrophes.

Karakalpak, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Russian-language poets turned the vanishing sea into a central ecological elegy. Writers such as Ibrayim Yusupov helped make the Aral not only a scientific warning but a poetic symbol of wounded homeland and betrayed water.