Name: What Happens to Wildlife After Nuclear Disaster
Uploaded: 2024-11-17T15:42:32.000Z
Duration: 20 min 51 s
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On October 23rd, 2077, nuclear weapons were launched by all the nuclear-capable nations of the Fallout world.

The exchange lasted for approximately two hours, and once the last atomic bomb had fallen, the world fell into a deep darkness of a nuclear holocaust.

In the resulting wasteland, giant creatures like ants, mole rats, cockroaches, and geckos roam, mutated versions of their previous forms.

This rosy picture is the world of the Fallout games, and provides us with a good reminder that we're lucky that the entire world has not yet obliterated itself with nuclear bombs.

That being said, even though we've not reached total nuclear destruction, our world has had devastating nuclear events.

Actual bombs dropped on cities, nuclear bomb tests, nuclear power plant explosions, and nuclear accidents caused by natural disasters.

And after the initial blasts, high doses of radiation can remain in its wake for years, maybe even for centuries.

Many of the places where these events have happened have become uninhabitable for humans, because it's basically a guarantee that over time, the radiation would harm or even kill anyone living there.

And yet, in these supposed deadly places, certain animals are not just surviving, but thriving.

Some creatures are withstanding what we thought were lethal doses of radiation, and others are mutating because of it.

And entire populations are dramatically changing, evolving faster than scientists ever thought possible.

So after the dust settles, what actually happens to animals after nuclear disaster?

Or are they doomed to be a Fallout-esque wasteland forever?

Why do some populations of animals seem to thrive after such an event?

We can't exactly compare the Fallout world to our own, since nuclear bombs have not been dropped to that extent.

The only two bombs ever dropped on humans were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it's no mystery that the effect of this was mass death and unimaginable suffering.

There was no effort to study the animals exposed during these bombings.

There were obviously more pressing things to worry about.

But when it comes to the effect of actual nuclear bombs on local wildlife, we do have other data points.

In 1945, the age of nuclear testing began.

And since then, thousands of nuclear devices have been detonated, either on land, in the ocean, in the atmosphere, or in space.

One of the most aggressive series of tests began in July 1946 at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

Over 12 years, 23 nuclear weapons would be tested by the United States in this area.

In March 1954, the U.S. military launched a bomb named Castle Bravo, the world's first hydrogen bomb, creating a crater two kilometers wide and 80 meters deep.

The Castle Bravo bomb was two and a half times stronger than scientists expected, making it the largest bomb the U.S. ever dropped.

It caused widespread radioactive contamination.

The fallout spread radioactive material as far as Australia, India, and Japan, and even to the United States and parts of Europe.

It was 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb and is the most violent thing we have ever done to the ocean.

The immediate physical destruction was clear.

Surface seawater temperatures reached 55,000 degrees Celsius.

The surface of the sun, by the way, is 5,500 degrees Celsius.

Blast waves traveled at 8 meters per second, and blast columns reached the floor of the lagoon.

Coral fragments landed on boats miles away.

It's safe to say any creature in the blast zone was completely annihilated.

So much of this Pacific paradise was reduced to dust in an instant.

But now, 70 years later, what has become of Bikini Atoll?

Today, the craters are a remaining visible scar, and the lagoon still has high levels of cesium-137 and plutonium-240.

When scientists returned to observe the local wildlife, the first thing that they noticed was nurse sharks with only one dorsal fin instead of two, possible evidence of mutations caused by radiation exposure.

They also noticed the absolutely creepy palm trees, 100,000 coconut palms planted in perfect rows in the decades after the bombs, in the U.S.'s ill-conceived attempt to put the island back together.

Bikini Atoll is, by all reports, an eerie place.

So when researchers arrived at the craters of the biggest hydrogen bombs, what they found surprised them.

They had expected to find scattered fragments of coral communities barely clinging to life.

But instead, they found enormous, healthy corals.

They realized that these corals must have started growing immediately after the blasts, and they seemed to have been thriving for all these years.

But how have these nearly 70-year-old corals survived their radioactive environment with no immediately obvious cost to their fitness?

To find out, researchers sequenced the genomes of corals from the nuclear sites and compared them to corals growing in normal conditions.

And they found that overall, the corals growing in the nuclear blast sites were in fact not heavily mutated.

In fact, they had not really mutated at all.

This likely points to an ability in these corals to completely resist genetic damage from radiation, avoiding cancer and sometimes living for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

If we can figure out exactly what genes allow them to resist gene mutations and cancer, they could hold the secrets to our own longevity.

Similarly, the island is home to enormous coconut crabs who exclusively eat coconuts full of cancer-causing cesium-137 and strontium-90, which gets absorbed into their bodies.

One large crab was found to have 16 picocuries per gram of dry weight of strontium-90 in its muscle, and 1,600 picocuries per gram of it in its exoskeleton.

For reference, people in Connecticut were recently freaking out because they found 0.028 picocuries per gram of strontium-90 in Connecticut River fish.

And yet these crabs seem to be absolutely fine.

Scientists don't know yet the genetic underpinnings of how or why, but just like the corals, finding out could be pivotal in human medicine.

But this is not to say that we can just go blasting all of our oceans with no repercussions.

In the waters surrounding the atoll, scientists have calculated that 28 coral species have disappeared since the nuclear tests.

The species that repopulated the area may be resilient, but not every coral, by any means, returned.

If an area gets obliterated, can the ecosystem ever go back to the way it was?

To answer this question, you ideally have to compare an ecosystem before and after a major catastrophic event that wipes out communities and restarts primary succession, which is easier said than done.

But researchers got just the opportunity at another atoll in the Pacific Ocean that was subjected to atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1960s, an atoll that luckily had community surveys taken before the tests.

These researchers specifically wanted to know, are ecological communities assembled following describable rules?

Meaning, do ecosystems sort of have a fate attached to them?

Is a reef in this area destined to have this many corals, this many mussels, this type of fish, etc, based on forces like competition and predation?

Or are ecological communities structured by random processes?

Meaning, are ecosystems settled randomly, as if the snow globe of the universe just shakes everything up and all the pieces just fall wherever they fall?

And what they found was that on all reefs, community composition before the tests was very different from what it evolved to afterwards.

Meaning that it is much more likely that these communities settle randomly.

And so if you explode an entire island, things won't go back to the way they were.

So it seems that irradiated areas do get repopulated with life, albeit different life, than what was there before.

But there can be another consequence to wildlife when it returns to these nuclear areas.

On April 26, 1986, during a safety system test,

Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine experienced a devastating meltdown.

The ensuing explosion and the fiery plume it created released over 100 radioactive elements into the atmosphere and surrounding environment.

Two reactor workers were killed immediately, and another 28 first responders died within the first three months after the accident.

Around 200,000 people in nearby areas had to be evacuated to avoid the fallout.

And it's estimated that the accident spewed 400 times more radioactive material into the atmosphere than the atomic bomb dropped in Hiroshima.

The Soviet Union ultimately created the 2600 square kilometer

Chernobyl Exclusion Zone across the northern part of Ukraine, limiting humans who could go back to the contaminated areas.

And it wasn't only humans who suffered in the immediate aftermath of this accident.

Plants and wildlife died in huge numbers in the areas around Chernobyl.

A 600 hectare patch of pine tree forest was completely destroyed by the fire and radiation.

A 10 square kilometer area surrounding the Chernobyl power plant became known as the Red Forest, where the trees absorbed high levels of ionizing radiation, turned reddish brown, and died.

The Red Forest continues to be one of the most radioactive sites on the planet.

Bird species in the more highly contaminated areas of the CEZ have more genetic mutations, smaller brains, and in the case of barn swallows, less viable sperm.

And in 2007, researchers counted 66% fewer birds and 50% fewer bird species in the highly radioactive places around Chernobyl.

Other research studied 28 generations of mice living in the Red Forest and found remarkable levels of radioactive cesium and strontium.

And nearby farms claimed that from 1986 to 1990, nearly 350 animals were born with deformities such as missing or extra limbs, missing eyes, heads or ribs, or deformed skulls.

In comparison, only three abnormal births had been registered in the five years prior.

But other researchers have found that the effects of regular exposure to radiation are not always so straightforwardly negative.

Researchers are realizing sometimes it's not even that the animals are rapidly mutating, but rather rapidly evolving, and that natural selection is at work faster than they thought possible.

This is the case for the eastern tree frog.

This species normally appears in different shades of bright green, but the frogs in the Chernobyl area look nothing like they do in other parts of Europe.

Researchers sampled more than 200 frogs at varying distances from ground zero and found that those who lived in the areas with the highest levels of radiation historically, and that detail is important, had much darker skin color.

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What Happens to Wildlife After Nuclear Disaster

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