Striking photographs document environmental decay on world’s largest lake

Moving from Tehran to the more northerly lakeside city of Rasht aged 13, Khashayar Javanmardi’s youth was punctuated by weekends and extended holidays on the Iranian coastline of the Caspian Sea. “It was a dreamy place,” the photographer reminisced on a phonecall with CNN. “It was my utopia; everything happened for me at the Caspian.”

Diluting this picturesque vignette, Javanmardi recalled the nuisance of the accompanying gammarus: an amphipod crustacean similar to a freshwater shrimp that would nibble at his feet whenever he ventured into the water. He had always hated them, but as he grew aware of their absence, alarm bells started to ring. “That was the first thing I noticed change,” he said. “Later I read that, due to pollution, they were extinct. They had been food for bigger species…”

Climate change and a lack of rainfall has caused one of Iran’s longest rivers, the Ghezel Ozen, to almost completely dry up, resulting in a devastating loss of aquatic wildlife. (Image taken in February 2022). – Khashayar Javanmardi 2024 courtesy Loose JointsMore

Situated between Europe and Asia, the Caspian is the world’s largest inland body of water; a colossal-sized endorheic basin — or a major lake — that is also bounded by five countries, Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. In recent years it has been the source of much concern for those privy to its shorelines, owing to what the UN Environment Programme has described as “an enormous burden of pollution from oil extraction and refining, offshore oil fields, radioactive wastes from nuclear power plants and huge volumes of untreated sewage and industrial waste introduced mainly by the Volga River (which flows through Russia and into the Caspian Sea).”

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