During the Cold War, Vozrozhdeniya Island was a top-secret testing ground for deadly Soviet super-pathogens. Despite over two decades of abandonment, their legacy lives on. On the Kazakh-Uzbek border, ...

Back when the Aral Sea, in Central Asia, was the fourth-largest in the world, Vozrozhdeniya Island was a paradise, abundant with life. In fact, the thriving fishing towns floating in the Aral Sea once ...

The in-depth story of the 1971 Aralsk-7 Smallpox Incident in the Soviet Union. The Aralsk-7 facility at Vozrozhdeniye Island was anything but ordinary. There were no reports of loud explosions, rocket ...

The Aral Sea was a place of both beauty and mystery. On a quiet research day, a 24-year-old marine biologist named Lev Berg worked aboard a vessel, casting nets to study plankton and fish. Roughly 15 ...

Two views of the Aral Sea: Above, a satellite image of the Aral Sea, on the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, in 1964. In the middle of the image is Vozrozhdeniya Island, which was isolated ...

The island’s secrets have endured, partly because it isn’t the kind of place where you can just turn up. Since Vozrozhdeniya was abandoned in the 1990s, there have only been a handful of expeditions.