evidence: 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. 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.