Lake Poopó
A livelihood in Bolivia's high plains has suddenly disappeared, and a population that relied on the dried-up lake for centuries suddenly became refugees of climate change with nowhere to go.

The civilization that once thrived around Lake Poopó was forced to leave when the waterway dwindled, dying a slow death that was blamed on a lethal combination of drought, changing climate and failures by the government to keep it alive. Sitting more than 12,000 feet above sea level, Poopó shrunk for years before vanishing entirely just months ago.

According to the New York Times, climate change ultimately proved too devastating for the lake to survive. Since 1985, the lake warmed nearly half a degree Fahrenheit each decade, and the evaporation got worse and worse. Periodically, the lake would be nearly empty and the fish would die, and now the fishers are on their way out, officially becoming the latest refugees of climate change.

"The lake was our mother and our father," Adrián Quispe, a fisherman who lives in Llapallapani, told the Times. "Without this lake, where do we go?"

Over the past two years, many of the indigenous Uru-Murato people who lived in the area went to work in the lead mines or salt flats 200 miles from the lake, the Times report also said. At this point, fewer than 650 Uru-Murato still live in the three villages where they once flourished.

The saline lake spanned as much as 1,200 square miles, but its shallow nature allowed it to evaporate rather quickly, especially during El Niño years. At the end of last year - a year in which El Niño was very strong - Lake Poopó was declared drained.

These images, taken less than three years apart, show how rapidly Lake Poopó vanished. (NASA)

Scientists have also placed some of the blame on officials who made several missteps when they had the chance to preserve the lake. Researcher Lisa Borre told National Geographic that the Bolivian government could've done more to manage the water supply and enact plans to keep the lake alive, but they failed.

The result of those failures, paired with the impacts of climate change, was the permanent loss of Bolivia's second-largest lake. "This is a picture of the future of climate change," German glaciologist Dirk Hoffman told the Associated Press.