Vozrozhdeniya island

The Rebirth Island (Russian Остров Возрождения / Ostrow Wosroschdenija ) was an island in the Aral Sea, which has finally become part of the mainland only to the peninsula and 2008 due to the silting 2002. Thus, it does not represent a recognizable landscape feature more

The island got its name during a Russian expedition in the 1850s. After the frequent administrative rearrangements in Central Asia, the island belonged since 1936 to the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan. From 1948, the Soviet military research laboratory for biological weapons built up in Kantubek. With the end of the Soviet Union, the laboratory was dissolved in 1991 and Kantubek a ghost town.

The initially relatively small island grew during the silting of the Aral Sea since the 1960s increasingly and multiplied their territory, primarily south to the Uzbek coast there, but also to the west and east and north to about the running in the Aral Sea border Kazakhstan also. In June 2002, the island joined to the Uzbek mainland and formed a now more than 100 km wide land bridge.

Due to the heavy pollution of the environment of the original research laboratories of the Soviet authority Biopreparat (including with anthrax ) is feared that on Rebirth Island native reptiles could spread deadly pathogens on the newly created land bridge.