Aral Sea Aral Sea The Aral Sea () was an endorheic lake (one with no outflow) lying between Kazakhstan (Aktobe and Kyzylorda Regions) in the north and Uzbekistan (Karakalpakstan autonomous region) in the south. The name roughly translates as "Sea of Islands", referring to over 1,100 islands that had dotted its waters; in the Turkic languages "aral" means "island, archipelago". The Aral Sea drainage basin encompasses Uzbekistan and parts of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and Iran. Formerly the fourth-largest lake in the world with an area of , the Aral Sea has been shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that
Science and technology in Uzbekistan field of science and gender, 2013 or closest year Source: "UNESCO Science Report: towards 2030" (2015), Table 14.1 Since 2012, Uzbekistan has ceded its lead to Kazakhstan for the number of published scientific articles, according to Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, Science Citation Index Expanded. Even taking population into account, Kazakhstan’s output is now much higher than that of its neighbour, with 36 articles per million inhabitants, compared to 11 for Uzbekistan. The majority of scientific papers focus on physics (35%) and chemistry (21%), a pattern also found in Kazakhstan. Since 2006, the rate of international collaboration has remained steady,