During the Carboniferous period 300 million years ago trees just fell over and lay there because nothing had evolved to decay them yet.
"""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 conditions were responsible for the high rate of coal formation."""
It's interesting to think just how much went on before trees with lignin showed up. Flowers are also relatively recent - 150mya.
* there is evidence for partial lignin breakdown in existing deposits, so we know it was a thing back then
* if it were just lignin breakdown, then we'd see orders of magnitude more deposits. that is, if you look at the per year deposit rate, you'll see only a small fraction of lignin being deposited.
* a large fraction of deposits doesn't even contain lignin, often below or above deposits with lignin, but without there being a different rate of depositions between them.
(copying my earlier comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34654837 )
"Before trees grew wood that was unable to rot and so became coal but after fungus came now wood is ruined and it's impossible to make coal again."
Understanding that coal formation is a reversible process and that a new agent didn't permanently ruin the process, is a sigh of relief.
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...
Fwiw, I did mention that the animal lives are possibly lower quality and definitely shorter lived. So I'm not quite sure what you're rebutting from my comment. It appears that you're just rephrasing part of it but without any source and clear suppositions from a misunderstanding of the data in the first paragraph I wrote.
Here's a study you may be interested in[0]
> The minimum and maximum radiocesium concentrations were 87.1 Bq/kg FM and 8,120 Bq/kg FM, respectively, with a median concentration of 450 Bq/kg
> If the residents consume the wild boar meat as a meat source once, the median committed effective dose was in the range of 0.062 to 0.30 μSv/day, with a maximum value of 5.4 μSv/day. In Japan, the natural effective dose from food ingestion was estimated to be 99 µSv/y, which was 0.27 µSv/day
> The committed effective dose for one-time ingestion of wild boar meat could be considered extremely low for residents in Tomioka.
You can use this information to calculate risk. Let's combine based on these numbers instead of mine. EU dosage limit = 20mSv/yr. We'll subtract 2.1mSv for average German dosage[1], leaving us 17.9. Taking the higher dosage from this study (13.5x German thresholds) giving us 3314.8 "meat sources" to reach the limit (defined at the bottom by median pork consumption, maximum ~50g/day). Let's then say they eat 3 servings per meal, eat 3 meals a day, and do so for an entire year. Their dosage will be 19.84mSv/yr (17.739 from the 8,120 Bq/kg boar). Your relative increase in lifetime chance of cancer at 20mSv protracted radiation exposure is approximately 0%. It is approximately 0% even at 40mSv protracted. Your risk of getting cancer due to eating that much meat is well above 0, since a single source here is roughly 50g (the recommended limit for daily consumption of red meat) and you're eating 9x that (450g/day). Your risk of cardiovascular issues are even higher.
Were I to live in Germany, I'd appreciate the cheap pork.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7283223/
[1] https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/natural-radiati...
You'd need to eat that much for what to happen? Radiation sickness (since you mention that afterwards)? I'm pretty sure people are more concerned with increased cancer risk than that. Not saying that this is a valid concern here either, just that radiation sickness is on the far end of a spectrum of dangers.
No, to hit EU dosage limits (20mSv). Which still is below actual risk of cancer. This is a small risk if taken all at once (acute exposure) but not found when protracted. For example, UK workers who consistently got 30-40mSv/yr had no statistical increase of cancer. So the number is 0% increase in cancer risk due to radiation exposure.
But again, we're talking about eating an __absurd__ amount of HIGHLY RADIOACTIVE boar you can find (well above thresholds), DAILY, and for an entire year. Do you know what 3lbs of pork looks like? The volume is 9 x 5 x 4 inches and is 24 servings. You're eating that daily, and it is the most radioactive boar you can find. It is not only an absurd amount of food, but also unrealistic to even source with high levels of effort (*most* radioactive, not average).
But here's the thing, consuming that meat DOES result in a multiple percent increase in risk of getting cancer. The problem is that this is due to eating red meat and the risk would be the same if you were sourcing non-radioactive boar. You're focusing on the wrong thing if you're concerned about your health and safety.
What part of "eating 3lbs of pork a day is going to cause your heart to explode" is not being understood here? You're clearly not the only one that is missing this. I'm not sure how I'm being unclear.
It doesn't matter how we perceive as nature coping with this disaster. The fact that it shouldn't have happened, the fact that there are still other reactors in operation of the same type, the fact that billions of tax payer dollars went into preventing more severe consequences should be a warning sign that this madness we call nuclear power needs to stop.
What's one thing the engineers of Fukushima and Chernobyl had in common: They all thought the reactor would be safe.
This is definitely a traumatic event. I'm not going to downplay this or the harm done at Fukushima. But I also don't think it is helpful to exaggerate the damage. The context of the discussion here was about nature and wildlife, so that's what I talked about. If you want to bring people into the conversation then I think that's a different matter. The cost of disruption to people's lives is large, both economic, mentally, and physically. But we also need to be clear that these costs are not because of radiation. It is important because we have these same costs when it comes to matters like oil spills, ground water contamination, and other such events that are far more common but do not receive yearly articles on (despite these events happening yearly).
> What's one thing the engineers of Fukushima and Chernobyl had in common: They all thought the reactor would be safe.
This is not a good faith argument here and not actually accurate. If you would like to engage in good faith I'm more than happy to. But if you want to just vocalize your non-expertise opinions and berate anyone who doesn't agree, then that's not a conversation, that's a hostage situation and violates HN rules.
Now I'm sure if you go digging in the Red Forest like the Russians did at the start of the war you're going to have a bad time, but the exclusion zone has settled down significantly. Most of the highly radioactive isotopes have by definition a very short half-life.
Are you confident there are fewer microbes?
[1] http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/radiation...
https://www.fda.gov/food/irradiation-food-packaging/overview....
So: thoroughly sterilised, if the FDA isn't totally off.
Environmental extremists come to the conclusion that irradiating large patches of Earth to make it unlivable for humans but is a net benefit to the non human ecosystem because the damage from human habitation far exceeds the damage from radiation. And of course, life evolves and adapts to the radiation. Then they start seeding dirty bombs to intentionally create more and more of these no go zones that become nature sanctuaries.
I suppose "The 100" is partially playing into this concept.
If you want to make a difference make sure that you start a forest and grassland fire every single year - the regular fires ensure the resulting fires are small and leave a lot of carbon behind some of which will get incorporated into the forest floor and forever stored away. Plus forests depend on those fires to clean up all the under brush.
Note, the above applies to most forests in North America, but you need to check with a local expert in forests to understand the details and where it doesn't apply. Every location/climate has different forests with different needs. There is no blanket statement that is right for everything.
All you need to know from the article.
Forests Around Chernobyl Aren’t Decaying Properly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7404345 - March 2014 (121 comments)
Of course we want this litter to remain just where it is as many decades as we can, but under each rock there is always an idiot, so the healing process is never guaranteed.
No humans messing around plays a big role, but everything being wet most of the time certainly helps.
Not exactly true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone_...
> "At least one suspect was arrested for alleged arson".
> "the local young man has confessed to starting fires for fun"
Ok. Lets change "soldiers" by a more generic "human pieces of s*t".
I wonder if any fossil were radioactive before to became a fossil. That would made the process much easier.
"There are huge wildfires because no water in the area".
This is a lie that we tell ourselves. There is not water in the area because wildfires. Many of this fires were deliberated crimes and would have burn with or without water. The lack of water is a scar of a previous attack.
Somebody should build a forest Matrioska with a tiny cow cranium in the inner figure. Maybe this way the people would finally understand the obvious rule. After a few thousand years untouched, all forests became "rainforests".
There have been others - it's a very dry place in summer.
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)
They just blew a major dam in Kakhovka, Ukraine, with tens of thousands being evacuated.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-no-threat-f...
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/live-updates-ukraine-accuses-russia-of...
They should experiment with bringing in decay promoters to try to prevent a devastating fire from making things worse. (Assuming they haven't done so already, which may be wrong given the age of the article.)
i hope they can decay so their spirits can finally be laid to rest. the last thing ukraine needs right now is to be flanked by some restless undead radioactive ents
