North Aral Sea levels further were due to begin in 2010. The Aral Sea began shrinking in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union decided that the two rivers feeding it, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, would be diverted to irrigate cotton and food crops in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In 1986, due to an accelerated loss of water, the Aral Sea split into northern and southern parts; the southern part is the current South Aral Sea. There is now an ongoing effort in Kazakhstan to save and replenish the North Aral Sea. As part of this effort, a dam project was completed
Transport in Uzbekistan of inland waterways. Since the mid-1990s, commercial travel on Uzbekistan's portion of the Amu Darya has been reduced because of low water levels. As of 2010, Uzbekistan had 10,253 kilometers of natural gas pipelines, 868 kilometers of oil pipelines, and 33 kilometers of pipelines for refined products. As of 2012, Uzbekistan has 53 airports. 33 of them have paved runways, six of which had runways longer than 3,000 meters. The largest of them, Tashkent International Airport, is linked with European and Middle Eastern cities by direct flights of Aeroflot, Lufthansa, and Turkish Airlines, and with New York and Los Angeles