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mrbluze writes:
"Rachel Nuwer from the Smithsonian Mag gives a good summary around a paper entitled "Highly reduced mass loss rates and increased litter layer in radioactively contaminated areas" (Oecologia, March 2014):
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.
... the Chernobyl area is at risk of fire, and 27 years' worth of leaf litter, (researcher) Mousseau and his colleagues think, would likely make a good fuel source for such a forest fire. This poses a more worrying problem than just environmental destruction: Fires can potentially redistribute radioactive contaminants to places outside of the exclusion zone, Mousseau says. 'There is growing concern that there could be a catastrophic fire in the coming years.'
A forest fire burning radioactive plant debris could be catastrophic. The Fukushima disaster is likely to have the same problems locally, but it poses additional risks because radioactive water continues to flow into the sea at an alarming rate, which will likely affect oceanic bacterial levels in a similar way."
(Score: 5, Informative) by Alphatool on Tuesday March 18 2014, @12:30PM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mrbluze on Tuesday March 18 2014, @12:55PM
This deserves up-moderation. Until know my understanding of the effect of low-ish level radiation (not enough to kill plants etc) is that it promotes faster mutations in microbes which does not equate to failure of an ecosystem but more rapid change, sometimes not adaptive, but considering that bacterial replication is rapid, niches which are exposed are usually quickly filled.
Do it yourself, 'cause no one else will do it yourself.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @01:55PM
Mousseau may have done some shoddy work in the past, I don't know about that but what I can see is
your link is from 2013
the article is from 2014
so unless the good Dr. Patrick L. Walden has a time machine this is not a rebuttal to the article.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Alphatool on Tuesday March 18 2014, @09:23PM
I'll just point out that the experiments were mostly conducted in 2008.