A friendly fox in Pripyat, Chernobyl exclusion zone
*happy cheerful music as fox plays in deserted nuclear radiation land*
This is the aesthetic
Fun facts about the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone:
1) Most of it is pretty safe, even for long periods of time. In fact about 200 native people still live there, but no new settlement is allowed, so that number has declined from about 1200 after the zone was created in 1986.
2)The zone has become an unintentional animal reserve. Its ~1000 square miles of uninhabited forest. Poaching happens, but not to the degree one might expect due to the fear of radiation. Also as a consequence there are lots of human friendly animals like this fox. Most of the humans they do see are tourists that regularly feed them.
3) Its one big science experiment on post human occupation, environmental contamination, and radioactive degradation. Weve actually learned a hell of a lot about what would happen to a city after everyone leaves and how nature takes back over thanks to the city of Pripyat. And how the environment adapts to sudden changes and evolves. A fungus was desvovered in and around the Chernobyl Disaster Site that creates chemical energy out gamma radiation emitted from the melted down core. Something biologists had only theorized as even possible a few years ago, and heres this fungus feeding on it. Its crazy man!
^^ i was literally thinking about if nature and wild life had taken back over the area
Adorable fox + interesting science, 10/10
Radiation eating fungus.
We all gotta die, and I feel good knowing that the world has the ablility to heal itself.
Radiation, aside from acutely deadly levels, doesn’t have to kill you.
Chronic radiation exposure only raises your chances of developing a related illness by raising your cell death rate and also damaging your DNA, thus giving newly created cells a chance to develop “wrong”. There is also research that radiation affects the immune system which should take care of that very thing, futher raising you bad chances.
But, these chances are high to begin. We are talking about one additional cancer death among thousand.
Those chances rise further the longer you are exposed and the higher your cell renewal is: if you are a child the danger is high, when you are middle-aged to older… chances are you’ll die before you encounter a big problem.
Of course, you wouldn’t want to live in a highly irradiated zone but generally speaking, radiation is more of a statistical problem: you wanna get big groups of people out but if you have 1500 stubborn idiots above the age of 40, one or two more dying of cancer won’t make a big dent.
(That may sound callous but I grew up in a uranium mining area and you develop opinions about uranium mining waste as flooring for playgrounds. ^^)
mostllynature 