In August of 2019, writer Jay Owens traveled to the remote deserts of northwestern Uzbekistan to a city called Moyniak.

She was there to research one of the largest catastrophes in environmental history, the drying up of an enormous body of water called the Aral Sea.

But what Jay actually found when she arrived was trippier than anything she could have imagined. I walk up to a stage set on the edge of a desert.

The music starts playing really good techno, really good sound system.

Well, the technically musicians from Berlin, from Japan, people who have played at Berghine

were coming to this tiny tumblebeed town in Western Uzbekistan.

There in the middle of the desert was a music festival. It was called Stihia, or

force of nature, and it was founded to draw attention to this environmental catastrophe

that had happened here. At one time, the Aral Sea had been the size of Ireland, but over the last

few decades, it had entirely disappeared.

And now, this music festival was bumping right there where the sea used to be.

You have world-class DJs playing astonishing, fantastic music, absolutely transformative,

into the open air, right at the end of the road on a cliff overlooking

what was once the Arles Sea, but is now empty sand.

And the sound just rings out for miles and miles into the desert night as lasers, trace the sky.

Absolutely sublime.

I'm Dylan Thuris, and this is Atlas Obscira, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we're going to Moinac.

It is the city on the edge of what used to be one of the world's largest seas,

and the site of one of the world's most forgotten environmental disasters.

Writer Jay Owens tells us how Soviet-era industrialization changed the ecology of this region forever,

and how, today, the people who live there are considering

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