A vanished Soviet bio-weapons island has re-emerged from the Aral Sea, exposing a chilling legacy buried beneath an abandoned ghost town for decades. Vozrozhdeniya Island, once a remote Soviet testing ground for anthrax, smallpox, plague and other biological agents, stopped being an island in 2001. A U.S.-Uzbek operation followed in 2002, targeting laboratories, buildings and anthrax burial pits left behind after the Soviet program ended. The Shrinking Aral Sea Removes the Site’s IsolationThe Aral Sea was the world’s fourth-largest lake in 1964. The Soviets diverted the rivers that once fed the Aral Sea to grow cotton, which they called “white gold”.