Chernobyl and the magic of nature

The Przewalski horse is growing well in the contaminated area ( Sergey Gaschak ) The nuclear disaster two decades ago turned Chernobyl into the most dense radioactive pollution in the world. But life is not destroyed, but it has become a haven for many wild animals, like a nature reserve.

The no-entry area 30 km in diameter around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is reviving with intense vitality. The reason is because when humans evacuated after the explosion, many animals landed and turned this polluted place into their paradise.

Animals that once existed and grew like wild cats or large breeding birds disappeared for decades, now returning to the Chernobyl area. Even here the mysterious footprint of an animal-like bear, which no longer lurked in this part of Ukraine for centuries, appeared.

Ecologist Sergey Gaschak said: " The animals seem to have no sense of radiation and they will dominate the area, despite the radiation conditions here. Many birds are nesting right now. on the concrete coffin ".

Residents of the Chernobyl isolation area

Reappearance: Wild cat, owl, white heron, swan and possibly a bear.
Species included: European bison, Przewalski horse.
The species has an increasing number of breasts: badger, beaver, wild boar, deer, elk, fox, hare, otter, wild dog, wolf.
The number of birds increases in quantity: Warping cotton, sharing corn (with dark tips on the head), black grouse, black stork, cranes, white-tailed eagle. He refers to a giant block of concrete and steel erected to cover the explosion of the 1986 reactor.

" I saw nests of rock flutes, doves, terns and red-tailed birds and found their eggs ," the scientist added.

Plutonium may exist in that area, but there are absolutely no herbicides, pesticides, industrial activities or transport. So nothing disturbed the wild boar, which increased 8 times in quantity at Chernobyl from 1986 to 1988, except for another animal that is also reviving as a wolf.
Poisoning

However, the picture of natural life in the region is not so bright in the first months after the nuclear disaster, because then the radiation level is many times higher. About 4 square kilometers of pine forest lying close to the reactor were discolored and died, making them known as the Red Forest.

Some animals in the areas most affected by disasters also die or stop proliferating. The embryos of rats were disintegrated, while the number of horses left on an island about 6 km from the power plant also died because of their decaying thyroid.

A lush moose in the forest ( BBC ).

Cattle on the aforementioned island also stunted as the thyroid gland was destroyed. But their next generation surprised people, because their body parts were completely normal.

However, the current characteristic of animals living in contaminated areas due to the Chernobyl disaster is that they are radioactive at an unsafe level for humans to eat even though they are healthy.

Adaptability

There is a difference that has formed between animals that live only in a narrow area like mice with larger animals like elk, which have a habit of moving constantly in a range. wide should not stay fixed in the contaminated area.

Animals that roam in large areas have lower levels of radioactive contamination than animals trapped in pollution hotspots. However, there are signs that these less fortunate species can adapt to their living conditions.

Ecologist Sergey Gaschak has done many experiments on rats caught in the Red Forest. The results showed that they are slowly growing again, even though the trees in the area are still stunted and have an unusual shape.

The mouse is in the process of experimenting ( BBC ).

" We marked the rats in the polluted area and released them and captured them a long time later. We found that they lived as long as those in relatively clean areas ", Sergey said. know.

The next step of the study was to bring the mice in less polluted places into the Red Forest. "They don't feel very well. So the difference between the mice living here and the new ones is very clear," Sergey concluded.

The surge

In all of his studies, Sergey found only a mouse with symptoms like cancer. He found a lot of evidence of DNA mutations, but they did not affect the physiological function as well as the fertility of animals.

Mary Mycio, the author of the book Wormwood Forest studying the universe of Chernobyl, points out that a mutated animal in the wild life will die or be eaten, before scientists can observe it.

Moreover, as she emphasized, scientists generally only studied the entire number of a species, not what happened to an individual.

Nuclear storage place

The isolated area is located both in Ukraine and Belarus ( BBC ).

Mary Mycio also judged that the benefits that wild nature enjoyed in people evacuated from the area were more impactful than any radiation damage they suffered.

In her book, she quoted British environmentalist James Lovelock talking about the idea of ​​preserving nuclear waste from electricity production in tropical forests, or in other habitats that follow him. "needing to fight the destruction of greedy development planners".

A large area isolated from the Chernobyl disaster located in the territory of Belarus was officially transformed into a nature reserve. Ecologist Sergey Gaschak wants Ukraine to follow this model, turning 2,500 square kilometers of their isolation into a national park or park.

Unlike the Ukrainian Green Party, Sergey is not worried or protested if the government implements a plan to build a deep storage in the region, to store nuclear waste from across the country.

Government