The Case of the Disappearing Anthrax Island

By Ken Jennings

August 22,2015; 6:21AM,EDT

Credit: NASA
Sometimes islands can disappear-but the island of Vozrozhdeniya did not sink into the sea.
When islands disappear, it's usually not in a fiery, overnight, Atlantis-type apocalypse. I've written before about islands that are gradually disappearing due to rising sea levels, but here's the strange story of an island that disappeared not under the waves-but into the desert.
The five-year-plan that made an entire sea disappear.
During the mid-20th century, the Aral Sea in Central Asia was the fourth largest lake in the world at over 26,000 square miles, roughly the size of Ireland. Its thriving towns provided the Soviet Union with a sixth of its annual fishing catch and most of its muskrat pelts. (Gotta have muskrat pelts!) But then the Soviet government decided to divert the two region's two major rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, to irrigate cotton fields. They were essentially signing a death warrant for the Aral Sea.
The Aral Sea is now arid desert.
Over the next four decades, the Aral Sea wasted away from the map, eventually losing 80 percent of its water. This killed millions of fish, left rusty boats high and dry in the middle of landlocked Kazakhstan, and produced vicious dust storms laced with pesticides, fertilizers, and other agricultural pollution. But the scariest result of the evaporation, which the U.N. has called "one of the planet's worst environmental disasters," might just be tied up with a tiny island called Vozrozhdeniya.
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More accurately, Vozrozhdeniya is an ex-island.
Vozrozhdeniya, or "Rebirth Island," was a hot, desolate 75 square miles of nothing in 1948 when the Soviets decided to build Aralsk-7, a biological weapons test site, there. For the next 44 years, agents like anthrax, smallpox, and bubonic plague were all weaponized there. (You may remember the lab as a site in the Call of Duty: Black Opsvideo games.) As the lake shrank, the once-isolated Vozrozhdeniya became a bigger island, then a peninsula, then a land bridge. Today, the eastern basin of the Aral Sea has dried up completely, for the first time since the middle ages. Vozrozhdeniya is now just a slight rise in the Uzbek desert.
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