For all the amazing things humans have achieved – building incredible structures, creating technological miracles, preserving cultural sites – there are a lot of things we’ve torn down, too. Whether due to war, climate change or debatable industrial decisions, here are just a few of the amazing sites man has destroyed…

Once the world’s highest ski resort, The Chacaltaya Glacier was the stuff of dreams for ski buffs, where you could ski above the clouds at 17,388 feet while being spoilt with views of Lake Titicaca on the horizon.

But thanks to the horrors of climate change, the glacier has now vanished. More than 80% of the glacier was lost in 20 years, and the rest disappeared six years earlier than scientists predicted, in 2009.

Skiing on the glacier is now a distant memory, with the once bustling attraction now effectively a ghost town, with empty cafés and bars, and rusty ski winches. It's not just skiers and snowboarders that are feeling the effects, though, as the disappearance of the glacier means local water supplies are directly affected.

Standing within the Syrian desert, northeast of Damascus, Palmyra was one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world and part of the Roman Empire. The enormous ruins of the great city date from the first to the second century, and are hugely significant for their art, architecture and religious monuments.

Once one of Syria’s biggest tourist attractions, the fate of Palmyra has been devastating: seized by ISIS, the site’s irreplaceable columns, temples and avenues were swiftly destroyed by explosives.

UNESCO's Director General Irina Bokova said of the devastation: “This destruction is a new war crime and an immense loss for the Syrian people and for humanity... This is why the protection of heritage is inseparable from the protection of human lives, and we must all unite to put this at the centre of all efforts to build peace."

The Aral Sea was once the fourth largest lake in the world, covering 26,000 square miles on the border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

But after the rivers that fed the lake were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects, the Aral Sea only took a few decades to shrivel up entirely, decimating local fishing industries, popular tourist seaside destinations, and leaving behind sad, rusty boats in the empty space where the lake once was.

In what the BBC called “one of the most dramatic alterations of the Earth’s surface for centuries”, the disappearance of the lake has not only affected fishing communities, but also the general health of the population. The chemicals that were left behind after the water dried up are sometimes picked up by high winds and distributed in reservoirs to make the drinking water unsafe. The barren, arid area is now visited by tourists with their cameras looking for eerie photographs, while locals wish for the return of the waters sometime in the future.

Boeung Kak Lake, in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, was once a thriving tourist hot spot: the picturesque lake and lakeside area was popular with backpackers who congregated there to sit, chat, drink beer and watch the sunset. Aside from being a popular destination for travellers, the lake and its surrounding area was also home to over 4,000 families as the largest urban wetland in Cambodia.

However, thanks to a property deal struck by the Cambodian government that involved filling the lake entirely, Boeung Kak Lake has been reduced to a muddy puddle that looks unrecognisable compared to its former self.

The deal has not only killed tourism in the area such as popular guesthouses, shops and cafés, but has also proved disastrous for the families who used the lake to survive. Many of them have had to relocate, deal with frequent flooding in their homes or take a paltry £6,000 sum as compensation.

Once the world’s tallest Buddhas standing at over 150 feet high, Afghanistan’s Buddhas of Bamiyan were destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban. The 1,700-year-old statues were once the country’s most famous tourist attraction, visited by Buddhist pilgrims for hundreds of years, and the world quickly mourned the loss of such irreplaceable cultural heritage.

This was no accidental side-effect of war, but a deliberate assault on the monuments, with the Taliban using dynamite to blow up the statues in the Bamiyan Valley in the Hindu Kush mountains of central Afghanistan, as part of an edict calling for the destruction of all non-Islamic statues.

While the statues have yet to be rebuilt, they were recently reincarnated. Onlookers saw the monumental Buddhas shine again in the mountainside cutouts where they once stood thanks to 3D light projections.

Noh Mul, one of Belize’s largest Maya pyramids, measuring a hundred feet tall and dating back at least 2,300 years, was destroyed in 2013 by a construction company while extracting crushed rock for a road building project.

Shockingly, according to archaeologists, this isn’t the first incident of its kind, with one expert saying that “bulldozing Maya mounds for road fill is an endemic problem in Belize.” The complex did lie on private land, but under the law, the government protects pre-Hispanic ruins.

Did you know that you could ski in Venezuela? The country’s tallest peak, Pico Bolívar, which stands at over 16,000 feet above sea level, was only a few decades ago a popular ski destination.

The destination was once home to ski enthusiasts, with a national ski slalom championship and a cable car making year-round skiing possible. But the onset of climate change has now made zooming down the mountain a distant memory.

It's predicted that the glacier on Pico Bolívar, once home to year-round snow, will completely disappear during the next few years. The environmental situation is so bad, in fact, that scientists have predicted that all Venezuela's glaciers will be gone by 2020.

You might have seen vibrant images of the Great Barrier Reef, all sparkling corals, colourful fish and sparkling waters, but the reality is a far more tragic fact. Off the coast of Queensland in Australia, the reef covers over 2,600 kilometres, and is full of hundreds of islands and thousands of individual reefs. It’s also an extremely popular tourist spot, with over two million visitors a year.

The reef is so enormous that it can be seen from outer space and is bigger than the United Kingdom, Holland and Switzerland combined. Yet rather than the colourful, healthy, Finding Nemo-esque paradise you might expect, there have been years of disastrous coral bleaching events, which are caused by global warming-induced rises to sea surface temperatures. Recent stats indicate that back-to-back severe bleaching events have affected two-thirds of the reef.

Considering that coral need about 10 years to recover, the increasing frequency of the bleaching events raises serious concern for the welfare of the reef, with some experts even going so far as to say it's at “terminal stage”. While climate change and warmer ocean temperatures are the biggest threat, there are also concerns that too much and poorly managed tourism could also negatively affect the precious reef.

The world’s oldest submerged city, Pavlopetri was occupied from the third millennium until 1100 BC. It’s a striking ancient city to visit, with plenty of surviving archaeological remains to explore, from courtyards and streets to traces of buildings and burial sites.

Not treated with the same respect as most other ancient monuments, one of its most potent threats come from pollution from large ships anchoring nearby, which discharge harmful waste and use damaging chemicals for hull cleaning nearby. It was listed on the 2016 World Monuments Watch in an attempt to protect it from a number of risks and to raise awareness about the threats facing the site.

It’s not just large ships that threaten the ancient site, though: smaller boats also travel over the archaeological remains, which can damage the foundations and walls by shifting the sediments around it. There are also no restrictions to visiting the site, meaning the ancient city is at risk from looters. Other impending threats include the construction of a power plant near Pavlopetri, and the building of a natural gas pipeline from Crete to the Peloponnese.

As far as ancient, jaw-dropping sites go, there are few that are as impressive as the Lascaux Cave in southwestern France. The UNESCO World Heritage Site contains cave paintings that are over 17,000 years old, and was inadvertently discovered by a group of teenage friends in 1940. There are over 325 metres to admire in the Lascaux Cave, with 600 paintings and 1,500 engravings, mainly of animals such as horses, bison, deer and wolves.

However, just as humans discovered the marvel, we were soon to accidentally bring about its destruction. The caves were first opened to the public in 1948 as a tourist attraction, but were closed just a few years later, in 1963, to help preserve its artwork. In just a few years, the hordes of tourists began to take their toll on the priceless walls, with the heat, humidity and carbon dioxide they brought with them threatening to damage the paintings.

Even attempts to solve problems have resulted in further issues: for example, a disinfectant used as a precaution before people entered the cave resulted in friendly organisms that prevented fungus from growing being killed off. Eventually, a replica of the cave was built nearby, so visitors can now take in the artistic marvel (well, almost) without bringing further damage to the ancient paintings.