The Moynaq Ship Graveyard is a fishing fleet rusting on the dry bed of the Aral Sea in Karakalpakstan, in western Uzbekistan, a dozen trawlers lying on the sand below the harbour wall of a town that was a port until the 1980s and now stands 150 kilometres from water that Soviet irrigation canals took away, the most visited ruin of the greatest environmental disaster of the century. The Aral was the fourth-largest lake in the world in 1960, and the rivers that fed it were diverted to grow cotton in the desert, so that it shrank to a tenth of its size and the fishing town of Moynaq, which had canned the catch for the whole Soviet Union, was left on a bluff above a desert; the ground under the hulls is the Aralkum, a desert younger than the people walking on it and one of the most active dust sources on the planet, its salt and pesticide blowing across the region. The harbour wall still runs along the old waterfront, marking exactly where the sea ended, and a memorial stands at the top of the steps down to the fleet.
The ships are climbed. Gaps in the plating and welded ladders lead onto the decks, where portholes, rivets and decades of scratched names have layered up on the steel, and a few hulls lie further out among the saxaul scrub, past the main cluster and usually empty of people; the dozen at the memorial are survivors, since most of the stranded fleet was cut up and sold for scrap by the kilo after the Soviet Union collapsed. The town's handful of streetlights are the last for a hundred kilometres, and on clear summer nights the Milky Way rises over the hulls with nothing to wash it out, while since 2018 the seabed has hosted Stihia, an electronic music festival that brings thousands out onto the sand in early summer. The museum in town shows the canning factory and the fishermen. Moynaq is a port with no sea, and the ships are still waiting on the bottom.