Slashdot Mirror
Forests Around Chernobyl Aren't Decaying Properly
An anonymous reader writes "Smithsonian Magazine has an article about one of the non-obvious effects of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown: dead organisms are not decomposing correctly. 'According to a new study (abstract) published in Oecologia, decomposers—organisms such as microbes, fungi and some types of insects that drive the process of decay—have also suffered from the contamination. These creatures are responsible for an essential component of any ecosystem: recycling organic matter back into the soil. Issues with such a basic-level process, the authors of the study think, could have compounding effects for the entire ecosystem.' The scientists took bags of fallen leaves to various areas around Chernobyl and found that locations with more radiation caused the leaves to retain more than half of their original weight after almost a year. They're now beginning to worry that almost three decades of dead brush buildup is contributing to the area's fire risk, and a large fire could distribute radioactive material beyond Chernobyl's exclusion zone."
SF authors were right!
Ezekiel 23:20
Go to other areas of Europe and Russia that have normal forest breakdown, grab some soil and dead leaves and spread them in select locations around Chernobyl. If the fungi and mold was damaged back when the radiation was really high it can be reseeded now that it's lower
Controlled, man initiated fires can be the solution.
Problem is: who will do the task, and how to keep it controlled?
And yet, the area to be safely burnt at one time can be so small that the time needed to carry on the task can be impracticable.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Sounds like the perfect place to sell burial plots to the rich. Their corpses can remain intact for thousands of years. And the fear of radiation poisoning will keep grave robbers away. As a bonus, it will save more land from being developed into wasted space. And this land that can't be used by the living will become useful as well. Sounds like a win-win to me.
THEM! (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047573 ) @slashdot http://bit.ly/1ipJ13A “Apart from a few ants, the dead tree trunks were largely unscathed[...]"
| Information is the currency |
The fire "risk" is natures form of healing. By re-distributing the radiation the area can heal.
We humans take issue with the idea of the radiation spreading outside "the zone" but nature doesn't.
...as I'm worrying right now about Fukushima. At least in Ukraine they aren't pumping sea water to cool it, which afterwards gets dumped in the ocean for further spread via currents - http://borderlessnewsandviews....
Carl Sagan said something about nuclear winter. Some decades later, folks ran an experiment on that idea in the San Dimas (CA) experimental forest. While 1 helicopter crashed (1 dead), they found that Mr. Sagan didn't have the half of it: there was also all the pollution from the decades accumulated on the leaves that would also be thrown into the atmosphere (along with basic plant carbon.) Now we learn we'll get the radiation right back at us, too. Sheesh, we're doing it to ourselves.
I won't believe a word about this, unless the full study is available for checking and has been independently reproduced. And when I write "available" I don't mean "you can purchase this paper for the wee lil' sum of 40 Euros".
Sorry, but just about any time I actually read the papers that articles on slashdot or anywhere else are about, the result is typically quite different in the actual paper or the methods employed have obvious holes like insufficient data. The more politically relevant the topic, the worse it gets. Hence, I won't take a word of this seriously.
Isn't decomposition a relatively recent phenomenon in geologic time? Coal deposits wouldn't exist if all those ancient forests just decomposed...
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
"The results were telling. In the areas with no radiation, 70 to 90 percent of the leaves were gone after a year. But in places where more radiation was present, the leaves retained around 60 percent of their original weight."
Areas with no radiation presently showed decomposition (70-90% reduction in weight).
Areas with radiation presently showed decomposition (40% reduction in weight).
So, yes, it seems like it would help. A 40% reduction is better than 0%.
"The scientists took bags of fallen leaves to various areas around Chernobyl and found that locations with more radiation caused the leaves to retain more than half of their original weight after almost a year." I'd certainly be toting my "bag of fallen leaves" if I were in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Of course, I would not be telling people about the where the bag lost some of its original weight. But to be honest, In places with more radiation I would think it would loose more weight. Or am I missing something?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
TFA calls it suffering. I'm not sure that's the word I'd use to describe microbes, fungi, and insects failing to decompose. I mean, who is the author to say with authority the desires and emotions of these little creatures?
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Don't know about anyone else, but I find this to be not at all surprising. Back in the 1960s the US did experiments with using radiation to preserve food. Seems if you zap all the decay organisms there is nothing left to drive the decomposition process. As an industrial process it is still used in some limited situations but the general hysteria about radiation pretty much eliminated this as a wide-spread technique. The results around Chernobyl suggests the same process works there as well -- the higher the level of radiation the better preserved things are. Be patient... the right bugs will eventually get in there, may just take a while.
There have been early reports that certain fungi can concentrate cesium. Let's find out if this is happening at Chernobyl, so we can start using the stuff to pull Cs137 from the environment.
suffer
1. To undergo or feel pain or distress: The patient is still suffering.
2. To sustain injury, disadvantage, or loss: One's health suffers from overwork. The business suffers from lack of capital. Pspahn's karma score has suffered since he became a pedantic arse.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
The place is isolated.... what is the ignition source; if there is no heat produced by decay of materials?
And it isn't reasonable to think that having radioactive material being spewed into the ocean like that is all-right.
Nobody said it was "all-right" or "safe", the OP said it was "safer" and AFAIK common-sense plus all the evidence from the various Pacific nuke tests supports that claim. Survival is about risk minimization, no activity is totally safe, there is no efficient way to safely dispose of nuclear waste, especially when it has already escaped into the environment, better to help wash it into the ocean than try to keep it on the beach.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Seems like there's some skepticism over the nature of the study. Somewhat reasonable, but it still seems to add to evidence about the long term effects of the disaster on the ecosystem around Chernobyl. Some comments seem to express skepticism about the importance of decomposition. Perhaps a biologist could go into greater detail on its benefit to life on earth. The suggestion about controlled fires makes me wonder if you read the article.
Your sarcasm is ironically correct. Only nature has fusion reactors, mankind is still trying to figure out how to build one.
Speaking of "no, idiot", sunlight IS radiation.
As anyone who has ever had a sunburn knows, it's damaging radiation. Quite a bit more damaging than any radiation anyone has ever received from. US nuclear power plant, in fact.
The obvious thing is obvious - however there is value in finding out what is going on here so we can be better prepared for other, possibly larger, radiation incidents or acts of war later.
The problem here is that microbes are among the most resistant things on Earth to radiation damage. And even larger organisms like earthworms or nematodes tend to be pretty resistant as well (though the study alleged to control for that). That's because they are small and have short life-cycles.
What I think is more likely here is that there is a common environmental condition that both inhibits decay and doesn't move radiation away as readily. For example, if the soil is dry, then that will inhibit decay and it might also result in less movement of radioactive chemicals out of the area.
But having said that, such things could be indirectly a product of radioactivity, if say, trees died off in high radiation areas and that in turn creates a more open, drier environment.
This is what Human hubris looks like.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
That wasn't in 1986 was it?
How the universe acts is always correct and proper. If you disagree with the universe, TOO BAD.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
A similar observation was made at the Palmerton, PA superfund site. The nearby Blue Mountain was the recipient of toxic fumes spewed from a nearby tin processing plant for almost a century. The resultant depositions killed almost all the vegetation on the mountainside, which furthermore, did not decay because of the dearth of micro organism capable of living there.
"...concentrations of cadmium, lead, and zinc in the soil were so high as to prevent regeneration. In fact, metals levels stopped all microbial activity, creating a biological desert where trees that had been dead for 20 or more years could not decompose. "
http://www.mabiosolids.org/upl...
How well does that energy source work?
It sinks energy instead of sourcing it.
I'd say an energy source that doesn't source energy
doesn't "work well".
Food irradiation, which was foisted on the American public by Bush 1's VP Dan Quayle, with no food labeling required sounds similar. A dose of radiation on our food, prevents it from decaying as quickly.
I had a friend in a startup back in the day who would keep an orange in his desk as a joke, saying that he would know if the produce from store X was nuked or not depending on how rotten that orange would get.
or did you just shift the goalposts to try to win some silly little mass debate game?
Could be the decay drivers are weakened, so can't eat the dead plants as fast as expected.
Could be the decay drivers can't cope with zombie plants.
Could be some of both.
Could be a side effect of Obamacare.
--
When the data disagrees with the models; which do you believe? I believe I'll have another beer.