evidence: Kamalov has brought me here to see what’s left of the once bountiful sea. He’s a 64-year-old senior researcher in wind energy at the Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences. He’s also an environmental activist, chairing the Union for the Defense of the Aral Sea and Amu Darya. Heavyset, with a flowing mane of white hair, Kamalov descends from an influential Uzbek family: His father was a renowned historian during the Soviet era, and his grandfather was the last elected khan, or leader, of the semiautonomous republic of Karakalpakstan before it became part of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic during the 1930s. [...] When Alexander the Great conquered this territory in the fourth century B.C., these rivers already had a long history of providing lifeblood to Central Asia. For centuries the Aral Sea and its vast deltas sustained an archipelago of settlements along the Silk Road that connected China to Europe. These ancient populations of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and other ethnicities prospered as farmers, fishermen, herders, merchants, and craftsmen. [...] Perhaps even more frightening is the revelation that the Aral Sea once was home to a secret Soviet biological weapons testing facility. Located on Vozrozhdeniya Island—which, now that the sea is gone, is no longer an island—the facility was the main test site for the Soviet military’s Microbiological Warfare Group. Thousands of animals were shipped to the island, where they were subjected to anthrax, smallpox, plague, brucellosis, and other biological agents.