Some of the World's Biggest Lakes Are Drying Up. Here's Why

Tire tracks stretched across the flat lake bed to the horizon. We followed them in a Suzuki 4x4, looking for clues about what’s happened to Poopó, once Bolivia’s second largest lake, which has vanished into the thin air of the Andean highlands.

LAKE POOPÓ: The dry, salt-crusted Bolivian lake bed
unfurls into the distance. Boats are stranded; the fish and
 waterfowl are gone. Fishermen who depended on the lake
 are moving elsewhere. It’s a diaspora born of drought.

We were driving on the lake bottom, yet we were more than 12,000 feet above sea level. The spring air was lip-chapping dry. Many of the fishing villages that have relied on Lake Poopó for thousands of years have emptied too, and we drove past clusters of abandoned adobe homes. Dust devils danced around them, spinning in warm winds. In the distance we spotted several small aluminum boats that seemed to be floating on water. As we drove closer, the mirage receded, and we found the boats sitting abandoned in the silt. I stepped out of the vehicle. My shoes cracked the salty crust that had formed jagged lumps, like ice cream in a freezer that has melted and recrystallized.

Read the National Geographic story by Kenneth R. Weiss - “Some of the World's Biggest Lakes Are Drying Up. Here's Why.”