Geography what town, once a fishing mecca, is now a desert with a cemetery of ships due to the shrinking aral sea

The correct answer is - Mo'ynoq/Muynak.

The town of Mo'ynoq, in the west usually spelled as Muynak, was once a developed town were fishing was the main source of income, but this western Uzbekistanian town has lost its glory over the past few decades, starting from the 1980's, and is now only a pale shadow of what it once was. This is due to the shrinking of the Aral Sea that lost most of its waters because of the bad irrigation policies during the USSR period, but also those policies continued after the independence of the Central Asian countries. So nowadays, instead of a landscape with big beautiful lake, there's a desert and small lake in the last stage before dying out.