It was on April 26th of 1986 that a reactor at Ukraine's Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, killing 31 people and costing 18 billion Russian rubles. Dangerous levels of radiation were released into the atmosphere, and though the disaster was largely contained, the aftermath of the meltdown is still being felt, with both humans and the area at large being affected to this very day.
As reported by Smithsonian, the environment surrounding the deactivated power plant is still extremely dangerous and unfit for living, with trees going slower than normal, birds having smaller brains than they should and a serious lack of spiders and other insects in the area. Game animals such as wild boar that have been caught outside of the exclusion zone have even been found to have dangerous levels of radiation inside of them, which just goes to show how massive the scope of the disaster still continues to be.
According to a new study, decomposers like fungi have also suffered from the contamination, and as a result, the natural process of decay is not occuring in the area. Authors of the study believe that this disruption of the basic process could have compounding effects for the entire ecosystem, and they've noted that trees surrounding the power plant still show no signs of decay, despite dying off and falling down shortly after the disaster.
In an effort to see just how much the lingering radiation is affecting the ecosystem at large, biologists hung hundreds of bags of uncontaminated leaves in different areas of the exclusion zone, leaving them untouched for an entire year. When they returned to the area, they found that while the leaves in areas with no radiation had completely decayed, the leaves in high radiation areas looked pretty similar to the way they did one year prior. Biologist Timothy Mousseau (above) is worried that the high density of leaves in the area makes it a breeding ground for a devastating forest fire, which could spread the radioactive contaminants to areas far outside the exclusion zone.
A frightening thought, isn't it?