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rfmcdonaldMitch Potter's Toronto Star article taking a look at the environmental after-effects of the Chernobyl disaster starts with the famously irradiated Red Forest. It turns out that the fungal and microbial life here, in the zone most heavily effected by fallout, has been so badly devastated that trees and their litter simply don't decay.
This is another entry in the long-standing debate about the long-term effects of the disaster. Some have suggested that Chernobyl, for all its damage, is actually attractive to wildlife, as a place where they can reproduce without worrying about humans. Others suggest that it's actually a place where wildlife encounter worse conditions, that animal populations would die out if new animals didn't come in. Is the irradiated zone in Chernobyl a source of new wildlife or a sink for existing wildlife, or perhaps simply an ecological trap where animals cope but not very well? Potter's article looks at it thoroughly.
Very few people understand the radioactive afterglow of Chernobyl as well as Canadian scientist Tim Mousseau, who has dedicated 15 years to unravelling the ecological and evolutionary consequences of the world’s worst nuclear catastrophe.
But for all the impacts he has seen in his more than 30 field trips to Ukraine since 1991, none was so eerie as his close-up encounter with the ghost forest of dead trees that lingers to this day inside the radioactive no-go zone north of Kyiv.
“We were trudging through the Red Forest, the area most heavily contaminated. And we noticed that many of these trees — trees that were killed in the initial blast in 1986 — were sitting there relatively intact,” says Mousseau.
“You squeezed them and they were hard. Trees that died that many years ago, they should be mostly sawdust. They shouldn’t exist. But they do.”
Something else struck him as strange — the leaf litter underfoot was thick. As much as three times thicker than in less-contaminated areas of Chernobyl’s 2,500-square-kilometre exclusion zone. “It was like walking on mattresses,” he says.
[. . ]
After the first year, the leaves in areas with no radiation were 70 to 90 per cent gone. Those nearest the hot zone were still about 60 per cent intact by weight. Moreover, microbes and fungi appeared to make the difference. They, and not insects, played the bigger role in breaking down the leaves and returning nutrients to the soil — and radiation, the study shows, is interrupting the process.
“We were just overwhelmed by the magnitude of the (radiation) effect,” Mousseau said.
“We’re trained to be skeptics and so when you walk through these areas, in the back of your mind you tend to doubt what appears to be obvious but may or may not be the reality. And so we were very surprised at how strong a signal came through.
“When we did the analysis we said, ‘Oh my God. This is huge.’”
This is another entry in the long-standing debate about the long-term effects of the disaster. Some have suggested that Chernobyl, for all its damage, is actually attractive to wildlife, as a place where they can reproduce without worrying about humans. Others suggest that it's actually a place where wildlife encounter worse conditions, that animal populations would die out if new animals didn't come in. Is the irradiated zone in Chernobyl a source of new wildlife or a sink for existing wildlife, or perhaps simply an ecological trap where animals cope but not very well? Potter's article looks at it thoroughly.
