Torres Del Paine National Park
Chile is home to countless tourist attractions, each one more stunning than the last. One of these is the Torres Del Paine National Park. Located in Chile’s Patagonia region, this beautiful park boasts granite rock formations, an extensive variety of wildlife, flowing waterfalls and the impressive Grey and Dickson glaciers. You would think that people would go out of their way to preserve this unique natural beauty, but alas, it has been constantly destroyed by man-made fires.
The first one happened on February 2005, after a tourist used a gas stove in an area of the park where camping was strictly forbidden. The fire lasted ten whole days and destroyed 7 percent of the park. The second, which happened after a tourist made a bonfire in February 2011, was luckily put out by extensive rain before causing irreparable damage. After the third one, in December of that same year, the park closed down until January 2012. Lastly, there was another one in 2015. Authorities are scrambling to try and prevent this national beauty from getting completely destroyed.
Slim River
Canada is known for having some of the most stunning natural landscapes in the world. Especially when it comes to the Yukon territory. Sadly, one of its most beautiful rivers seemed to disappear overnight in the spring of 2017. In what scientists called the first case of "river piracy" in modern times, the reason for the disappearance seems to have been the retreat of the huge Kaskawulsh Glacier, whose meltwater deviated from the Slim River to a different river.
What's even worse, these changes are causing the Kluane, Yukon's largest lake, to shrink. If you happen to be on the Alaska Highway 1, you'll be able to spot the already receding shoreline of the great lake.
Hillary Step on Mount Everest
Sir Edmund Hillary is known around the world as the first person to ever reach the top of Mount Everest in 1953. And so it made sense to name one of the most challenging parts of the mountain the 'Hillary Step'.
The step is basically a huge boulder located some 200ft from the mountain's peak. Apparently, the boulder loosened after the tragic 2015 earthquake in Nepal, and by May 2017, it seems to have disappeared altogether.
Uluru and its Fairy Shrimp
Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, is one of Australia's most famous landmarks. Located in the country's vast Northern Territory, it is a sandstone monolith that formed more than 550 million years ago. Once located at the bottom of the sea, it now stands at 348m above the ground.
Not only is this landmark considered a sacred and spiritual spot for Australia's indigenous people, it was once also home to the Branchinella Latzi, a rare species of fairy shrimp that was only found in the water pools on the Uluru. Sadly, the species vanished in the 1970s due to human waste that tourists had left behind over the years. Despite countless plights by the indigenous Anangu people asking tourists to stop climbing the Uluru, they have been consistently ignored.
The Aral Sea
People call what happened to the Aral Sea the world's most "dramatic" disappearing act. Located between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Aral Sea used to be the fourth-largest lake in the world. But after an irrigation project started by the Soviet Union in the 1960s, all the rivers that fed the lake were diverted, causing it to dramatically shrink in size almost immediately.
This was a terrible disaster for the fisheries and local communities that depended on the body of water. The little water that was left became increasingly salty, and extremely polluted after pesticides and fertilizers seeped into it. Today, the once-beautiful Aral Sea is a haunting spot with poor soil and some old, decaying ships. In a final, desperate effort to save the lake, Kazakhstan built a dam, but sadly, the Aral Sea will never return to its former glory.