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Forests around Chernobyl aren’t decaying properly (2014)

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Forests around Chernobyl aren’t decaying properly (2014)

#51

Post by godelski »

> including some [wild boar] bagged as far away as Germany—continue to show abnormal and dangerous levels of radiation.

This really needs to stop. I remember doing the calculation a few years back due to another HN post (and the German obsession around boar) and you'd need to eat roughly 0.55lbs (0.25kg) of the most radioactive boar you could find every day or 3lbs (1.4kg) of the median. That is to just hit EU radiation limits, not to hit a level where you're at risk. This also doesn't include that you'll heal over that period. The problem here is that if you're eating this much pork every day you're going to be at far higher health risks for heart disease than radiation sickness. Recommended is not more than 50g/day or 0.05kg/0.11lbs. For reference, Germans eat about 55kg of meat a year, so you'd be eating 220x the average German if you had a craving for the most radioactive boar and ate it exclusively. Germans used to eat more meat, and especially pork, and these stories have just done wild damage to the population. Especially because farm pigs aren't affected. But a side benefit is that less Germans are dying of heart disease, so I guess that's nice.

As for the forest, you may notice if you google it you'll see this story limited to 2014 and maybe a BBC article from 2019 as a result of the HBO series. [0] You may be interested to know that wildlife flourishes in Chernobyl and this is almost an accidental nature preserve. Life is shorter, yes, but life is flourishing and wildlife populations are far higher now than they were prior to the disaster. Population levels are similar to uncontaminated regions. It is really a fascinating area to understand from a biological perspective (same with Fukushima, which has similar results). When you dig into these they really challenge your preconceived notions of radiation damage. There is danger, don't get me wrong, and I don't think people should go inhabit these places just yet. But neither are these places dying. They're more like the post-apocalyptic movie scenes where animals and plants take over. There's far more nuance and interesting things happening in these regions and I wish we'd discuss these from a more holistic perspective.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190701-why-plants-survi...

Re: Forests around Chernobyl aren’t decaying properly (2014)

#52

Post by godelski »

themodelplumber wrote: post #48
jonplackett wrote: post #29

Weirdly, there was actually a period of history where this was normal. During the Carboniferous period 300 million years ago trees just fell over and lay there because nothing had evolved to decay them yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous

Did they make big fallen tree piles? What a time that could have been for any species interested in burrows, bushwhacking, or forts.

My brain loves to pretend that this is what happened for millions of years, but the truth is that it turns into dust and "dirt." Things still weather and get broken. Even stone turns to sand. But it takes longer than we're currently used to and the particles don't get processed. But this same event that the parent linked led to all our coal as well as an important niche that modern fungi hold today (they existed back then, but couldn't process the lignin. Interesting thing, there's a term called "evolutionary radiation" and this was one of the largest periods of time for this, but it is not related to the radiation in the context of Chernobyl.

Re: Forests around Chernobyl aren’t decaying properly (2014)

#53

Post by maxbond »

godelski wrote: post #51

> including some [wild boar] bagged as far away as Germany—continue to show abnormal and dangerous levels of radiation. This really needs to stop. I remember doing the calculation a few years back due to another HN post (and the German obsession around boar) and you'd need to eat roughly 0.55lbs (0.25kg) of the most radioactive boar you could find every day or 3lbs (1.4kg) of the median. That is to just hit EU radiat…

That might be an argument humans aren't endangered by contaminated boar, but is not an argument that the ecosystem isn't threatened. Presumably predators and scavengers are eating a significant amount of boar and other contaminated meat relative to their body weight.

Re: Forests around Chernobyl aren’t decaying properly (2014)

#54

Post by digging »

dekhn wrote: post #31
jonplackett wrote: post #29

Weirdly, there was actually a period of history where this was normal. During the Carboniferous period 300 million years ago trees just fell over and lay there because nothing had evolved to decay them yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous

That didn't sound too right for me (but my biology knowledge is dated at this point) so I read the relevant section from that page. It concludes wiht: """The delayed fungal evolution hypothesis is controversial, however, and has been challenged by other researchers, who conclude that a combination of vast depositional systems present on the continents during the formation of Pangaea and widespread humid, tropical con…

In general, it's mind-blowing to travel back in Earth's history and realize there were tens or hundreds of millions of years where strategies that are commonplace today had never been tried before (or they'd tried too early and failed). It makes one wonder, what will be the strategies of future life which no creature has yet evolved? Can we even imagine it?

Re: Forests around Chernobyl aren’t decaying properly (2014)

#56

Post by Dylan16807 »

thrashh wrote: post #14
rtkwe wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the exclusion zone is pretty low levels of radiation so I'm not sure how effective those are other than that they're an elevated background level. The FDA says 10 kGy is used for actual sterilization. Most of the zone is https://www.fda.gov/food/irradiation-food-packaging/overview... .

But that to me just says that radiation definitely delays growth and a little radiation already affects a much larger organism like a plant, it’s probably hurting smaller organisms much more.

Why would it hurt smaller organisms more?

Re: Forests around Chernobyl aren’t decaying properly (2014)

#58

Post by photochemsyn »

The Red Forest is highly contaminated, such that surface level microroentgens per hour are at least 10X than what's considered maximum safe level for humans, and likely a good deal higher in the soil.

There are other tests that could have been done, such as measuring the ability of soil suspensions taken from the Red Forest to breakdown cellulose in a test tube (studies that would probably require a lot of care in a radiation-safe lab), but the kind of study described in the article (leaving bags of leaves around to see what happens to them) seems to be enough to prove the point; fungal/insect breakdown of plant matter is inhibited in the most severely contaminated areas of the exclusion zone.

Looking around, here's a study on the contamination of fish in surrounding lakes (still an issue). Some fish are more genetically sensitive to it than others, but you probably wouldn't want to eat any of them:

"Impact of Environmental Radiation on the Health and Reproductive Status of Fish from Chernobyl" (2018)

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b02378

Re: Forests around Chernobyl aren’t decaying properly (2014)

#59

Post by pfdietz »

jackmott42 wrote: post #32
jonplackett wrote: post #29

Weirdly, there was actually a period of history where this was normal. During the Carboniferous period 300 million years ago trees just fell over and lay there because nothing had evolved to decay them yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous

And when that huge pile of trees finally started to burn, we got our first case of rapid global warming from burned carbon. The second one is done by humans right now.

Actually, burning of trees helped reduce CO2 over the long term. That's because burning is incomplete and produces charcoal. Charcoal doesn't decay, so when it is buried it semi-permanently takes carbon out of the biosphere. Over extended time, this would draw down atmospheric CO2. Some coal deposits from that period have a significant fraction of charcoal in them.

Re: Forests around Chernobyl aren’t decaying properly (2014)

#60

Post by Beldin »

rtkwe wrote: post #10
garganzol wrote: post #4

Radiation has a notable sterilizing effect - this is why the speed of a natural decomposition is diminished. Fewer microbes leads to a slower decomposition.

Most of the exclusion zone is pretty low levels of radiation so I'm not sure how effective those are other than that they're an elevated background level. The FDA says 10 kGy is used for actual sterilization. Most of the zone is https://www.fda.gov/food/irradiation-food-packaging/overview... .

There are 365×24 = 8760 hours in a year. So after 1 year and 52 days, we've crossed this threshold - at current levels.

So: thoroughly sterilised, if the FDA isn't totally off.

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