Many have visited an abandoned city and wondered what catastrophic event could have caused such an exodus from a metropolis once so evidently thriving. Yet these cities are usually hundreds if not thousands of years old, the everyday clamour and cry of civilization just an echo. Visit Mo’ynaq in Uzbekistan, however, and you can see apocalypse right here, right now.
The Soviet era sign still welcomes people to the city. Yet there are few visitors who stay more than a few hours. They all leave after they have done looking at what is reminiscent of a scene from a science fiction disaster movie – big ships adrift in the desert.
The city has seen a precipitous decline in its population since the 1980s. The problem? Mo’ynaq is a port – or at least it was. The sea is now 150km (almost a hundred miles) away from the point at which it used to lap up against the city’s harbour. The remnants of the cataclysm are everywhere in the form of the corroded hulks of fishing ships.
Click the pic to read more about this ghost shipyard.