Isle of Rebirth

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Edited satellite image (2004) of the Aral Sea with the (pen) island of rebirth

The Island of Rebirth ( Russian Остров Возрождения / Ostrow Wosroschdenija ) was an island in the Aral Sea , which only became a peninsula in 2002 due to its drying up and finally became part of the mainland in 2008. It is no longer a recognizable feature of the landscape.

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

The originally relatively small island grew noticeably in the course of the silting up of the Aral Sea since the 1960s and multiplied its territory, primarily to the south to the Uzbek coast, but also to the west and east as well as to the north over the border running into the Aral Sea Kazakhstan out. In June 2002 the island joined the Uzbek mainland and in 2005 it formed a land connection that was already over 100 km wide.

Chemical and bacteriological weapons were tested on the Island of Rebirth, which was the property of the Soviet Ministry of Defense, from 1936 onwards. As a result, for example, there was a mass death of fish in the Aral Sea in 1976 and in 1988 50,000 saiga antelopes died within an hour, their bodies being bulldozed. These incidents and the laboratory were kept secret until 1991. After the laboratory was closed on March 7, 1992, rusty, unlabelled barrels with pathogens such as plague , anthrax and smallpox remained. Even today the soil of the former island is still contaminated with anthrax and there are occasional cases of plague in the area.

Due to the heavy contamination in the area around the original research laboratory of the Soviet authority Biopreparat (including anthrax pathogens), it is feared that native reptiles could spread deadly pathogens on the island of rebirth via the newly created land bridge.

Area increase

  • The lake 1964

  • The island in 1964 (detail from the left above the center of the picture)

  • 1989

  • 1997

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bahro, G. (1998). Areas in Kazakhstan contaminated by the nuclear industry. In environmental degradation in arid regions of Central Asia (West and East Turkestan). Causes, effects, measures (pp. 33–54). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
  2. ↑ Katzmann, K. (2007). Black Book of Water - Waste, Pollution, Threatened Future . Vienna: Molden.


Coordinates: 45 ° 0 ′  N , 59 ° 10 ′  E