A number of NASA satellite images has revealed the decline of water levels in the Aral Sea, a gigantic environmental disaster called "the quiet Chernobyl."

NASA's Terra satellite started taking images back in 2000, when the vast central Asian lake called the Aral Sea was already a fraction of its 1960 size, according to Earth Observatory.

"This is the first time the eastern basin has completely dried in modern times," Philip Micklin, a geographer emeritus from Western Michigan University told NASA. "And it is likely the first time it has completely dried in 600 years, since Medieval desiccation associated with diversion of Amu Darya to the Caspian Sea."

This December, the Terra satellite will have been in space for 15 years in December, the spokesman added.

The Aral Sea was once the fourth largest lake in the world, but now holds less than 10 percent of its original water volume. The sea was a victim of a Soviet era water diversion project in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, according to Earth Observatory.

In 2000, the body of water had already separated into Northern and Southern Aral Seas, also known the Small and Large Seas.

The Southern Sea was split into tenuously-connected eastern and western "lobes," or basins, as seen in the satellite image taken in 2000.

Just 12 months later, however, the southern part of the connection had been lost, and the shallower eastern basin started to retreat over the following years.

Winters became colder and summers hotter without the lake to moderate temperatures, according to Earth Observatory.

"As the lake dried up, fisheries and the communities that depended on them collapsed. The increasingly salty water became polluted with fertilizer and pesticides," Earth Observatory reported. "The blowing dust from the exposed lakebed, contaminated with agricultural chemicals, became a public health hazard. The salty dust blew off the lakebed and settled onto fields, degrading the soil. Croplands had to be flushed with larger and larger volumes of river water."

More than 60 million people live around the Aral Sea basin.

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