Just a decade ago, Azamat Sarsenbayev felt the briny water and its blue hue when he jumped into the Caspian Sea—the largest body of water in the world. However, this colossal lake has now transformed into a barren expanse of rocks stretching toward the horizon.
Water has rapidly receded from the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan, a city located on the Caspian coast where this environmental activist has lived his entire life. “It’s hard to witness,” he told CNN.
Over 1,000 miles to the south, near the city of Rasht in Iran, Khashayar Javanmardi shares similar concerns. The Caspian Sea in this region is heavily polluted.
“I can’t swim anymore… the water has changed,” the photographer, who has traveled along the southern shore of the Caspian Sea documenting its decline, shared with CNN.
Images of the Caspian Sea showing the world’s largest lake is drying up.
The Dying Lake
Both men feel a deep connection to the water they grew up with and fear for its future.
The Caspian Sea is the largest inland body of water on the planet and the largest lake in the world. It holds a massive volume of water nearly equivalent to that of the state of Montana in the U.S. Its crescent-shaped “coastline” stretches over 4,000 miles and is shared by five countries: Kazakhstan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, and Turkmenistan.
These countries rely on it for fishing, agriculture, tourism, and drinking water, as well as for the oil and gas reserves beneath it. The Caspian Sea also helps regulate the climate of this arid region, providing rainfall and humidity to Central Asia. However, it is facing “trouble.”
Dams, over-extraction, pollution, and the increasingly significant impact of human-caused climate change are driving its decline. Some experts worry that the Caspian Sea is being pushed to a point of no return.
While climate change is causing sea levels to rise globally, the situation is different for inland seas and lakes like the Caspian Sea. They depend on a delicate balance between incoming water from rivers and precipitation and outgoing water through evaporation. This balance is shifting as the world warms, causing many inland lakes like the Caspian to shrink.
One does not have to look far to see what the future may hold. The nearby Aral Sea, located between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was once one of the largest lakes in the world but has completely vanished, devastated by a combination of human activities and escalating climate crises.
For thousands of years, the Caspian Sea has fluctuated between high and low water levels as temperatures have varied and glaciers have advanced and retreated. However, in recent decades, the decline has been occurring at an accelerated pace.
Human activities play a significant role, as nations construct reservoirs and dams. The Caspian Sea receives water from 130 rivers, yet about 80% of its water comes from just one river: the Volga, the longest river in Europe, winding through central and southern Russia.
Port city of Aktau, Kazakhstan on the Caspian coast.
Russia has built 40 dams, with 18 more under construction, according to Vali Kaleji, an expert on Central Asia and Caucasus studies at the University of Tehran. This reduces the flow of water into the Caspian Sea.
However, climate change is increasingly playing a role, accelerating evaporation rates and causing more erratic rainfall.
The Caspian Sea’s water levels have been declining since the mid-1990s, but the rate of decline has accelerated since 2005, said Matthias Prange, an Earth system modeler at the University of Bremen in Germany.
As the world continues to warm, the water levels will “drop sharply,” Prange told CNN. His research predicts that levels will decrease between 8 to 18 meters by the end of the century, depending on how quickly the world reduces fossil fuel pollution.
Even in more optimistic global warming scenarios, the shallower northern part of the Caspian Sea, mainly around Kazakhstan, is expected to completely disappear, said Joy Singarayer, a climate scientist at the University of Reading and co-author of the study.
For the Caspian nations, this is a crisis. Kaleji from the University of Tehran noted that fishing grounds will shrink, tourism will decline, and the shipping industry will suffer as vessels struggle to dock at shallow port cities like Aktau.
There will also be geopolitical consequences. The five countries competing for dwindling resources could reach a peak “in a race to extract more water,” Singarayer emphasized. This may also lead to new conflicts over oil and gas reserves if changing coastlines prompt countries to make new claims.
Caspian seals on the coastline in Russia. This species is at risk of extinction as the Caspian Sea’s water levels continue to dwindle.
Imminent Crisis
The situation has become dire for the unique wildlife of the Caspian Sea. It is home to hundreds of species, including the wild sturgeon, which is critically endangered and provides 90% of the world’s caviar supply.
The sea has been isolated for at least 2 million years, and its extreme isolation has led to “the emergence of strange creatures like very peculiar clams”—according to Wesslingh.
This is also a crisis for the Caspian seal, a marine mammal found nowhere else on Earth. Their breeding grounds in the shallower northeastern Caspian are changing and disappearing, as this species also struggles with pollution and overfishing.
Assel Baimukanova, a researcher at the Institute of Hydrobiology and Ecology in Kazakhstan, reports that aerial surveys show a significant decline in seal populations.
Many areas of the Caspian Sea are left barren.
There are few easy solutions to this crisis. The Caspian Sea is situated in a region that has experienced significant political instability and is shared among five countries, each of which will experience the declining water levels in different ways.
No country takes responsibility, but if they do not act collectively, the disaster of the Aral Sea could repeat itself, Kaleji warns, adding that there is no guarantee that the Caspian Sea “will return to its natural and normal cycle.”
Growing concerns about the fate of the Caspian Sea emerge at a time when the region is under increased scrutiny.
Next month, global leaders will gather in the coastal capital of Baku, Azerbaijan, for COP29, the United Nations’ annual climate summit, where they will discuss climate change responses under the shadow of oil rigs scattered across the Caspian Sea region.
In August, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev stated that the decline of the Caspian Sea is “catastrophic” and is becoming an ecological disaster, but at the same time, the country plans to expand its fossil fuel production, which is driving the decline of the Caspian Sea’s water levels.
Back in Kazakhstan, Sarsenbayev is trying to draw attention to the dire circumstances of the Caspian through captivating and comprehensive footage he posts on Instagram.
If the climate crisis and over-extraction of water persist, he fears “the Caspian Sea may face the fate of the Aral Sea.”
In Iran, Javanmardi continues to photograph the Caspian coast, capturing images of polluted water, shrinking shorelines, and barren seabeds while revealing the beauty that still exists and the human connection to the sea. He wants people to awaken to what is disappearing.
“This is the largest lake in the world; everyone should consider it important,” he stated.
