Brown bears return to Chernobyl after a century away

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30197341

by jackgavigan • 12 years ago

43 4 12 years ago

bbc.co.uk

davevil• 12 years ago

Great, here come the Yao guai :(

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

This is the interesting point that people miss:

"We have our models to predict radiation exposure but it does it in a very crude way - an average over a very large area - but we know that animals interact with the environment in different ways," observed Dr Wood."

Our models for environmental exposure are crude because we are really really good at getting people out of harms way. There are the Hiroshima and Nagasaki data points, there is Chernobyl and Fukishima (3 mile island didn't have a large enough foot print to be qualitatively change the models). We err on the side of caution (nobody wants to be the one that said "ok move back in" and have those people die later as a direct cause of that. Large mammals are an excellent proxy for human habitation.

The bottom line is that we call an area 'uninhabitable' because we don't have good models to reason about what would happen if people lived there. It is possible people could live there just fine, but nobody is going to 'try it' to find out, because the flip side is so dire.

click170• 12 years ago

My understanding is that wildlife has been returning in some form or another, since shortly after the accident.

Someone, I could have sworn BBC but all that's coming up in searches now is PBS, did a documentary about wildlife in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. I could have sworn it was about the wolves in the exclusion zone but touched on many topics.

If I recall correctly, the iron curtain itself actually helped wildlife somewhat by creating a strip of land across many European countries (where the fence itself was constructed) that wildlife was documented using as a highway for travel now that the fence has been torn down and that strip is largely left alone.

Fascinating stuff, both for the nuclear explosion, and the subsequent impact on surrounding wildlife.

Edit: I think this is the one that I saw. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iap7wXlMFIQ

wycx• 12 years ago

I also suggest this BBC Horizon documentary[1]. It has a quite entertaining segment where they test the radioactivity of small mammal specimens from around Chernobyl.

[1] http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xwy1o5_bbc-horizon-nuclear-...

Brown bears return to Chernobyl after a century away

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