Chernobyl 30 Years Later | Jim Beasley | TEDxPeachtree

when you hear the words Chernobyl or Fukushima sites are the worst nuclear accidents in our history well sort of images come to your mind a few years ago probably like most of you if you were to ask me to come up with an image of life there I would have described something like this an abandoned wastelands thats largely devoid of life and any animals would look something like blinky here but after spending several weeks inside Chernobyl conducting research I find a reality that couldn't be more different from that perspective Chernobyl was a terrible human and environmental tragedy more than 30 people who lost their lives in the immediate aftermath of the accident and over 350,000 people were forced to been in their homes levels of radiation released during the explosion were so severe that some plants and even animals were killed in those first few days to protect the people the Soviet government created a human exclusion zone around the reactor it's more than 1,800 square miles in size that's more than half the size of Yellowstone National Park but despite these protective measures for people wildlife have been allowed to persist inside Chernobyl and are exposed to the high levels of radiation that continue to blanket this landscape I've always been intrigued by the mystery of Chernobyl and as a wildlife ecologist have been curious about what's happened to the animals that now live in this toxic landscape so a few years ago as I was starting a faculty position of sitting in my office thinking of the different directions that I wanted to take my research program as I sat there i began to read through scientific studies on Chernobyl but as I read through paper after paper of wildlife studies I was baffled to learn just how little we knew about large man inside the exclusion zone this piqued my curiosity even more that's why I decided to commit to finding a way to get involved in research inside trinomial well turns out Chernobyl is not the sort of place you can just wake up roll out of bed and go out to work there are contamination issues to deal with roadblocks and what seem like every step along the way and there was a slight problem that I didn't have a clue how to speak Russian but I was really fortunate to team up with an incredible group of international researchers from Belarus Japan the UK and the US all with a common goal to better understand the health and ecology of wildlife that now lived inside the exclusion zone we began our work by analyzing some data our Belarusian colleagues had collected in the years after the accident they'd use helicopters to fly over the exclusion zone and count numbers of moose wild boar and deer and as we looked through their data we realized something remarkable not only had these species continued to live in Chernobyl but their populations had increased dramatically in a decade after the accident this contradicted what most people might have perceived have happened to animals there so we began to wonder were these animals simply surviving on the edges of the zone where radiation levels are lowest but to get at that kind of question would require spending months inside Chernobyl capturing animals conducting surveys to understand how these animals are surviving in this contaminated landscape I'll never forget the first time that I entered the exclusion zone I often describe it as an emotionally polarizing experience to enter the zone you first pass through this large guarded ominous gate that clearly depicts the danger that lies beyond and as you go past the gate and into the zone you begin to go through town after town of abandoned houses the past 30 years have taken a toll on their infrastructure but there's still an unnerving evidence of a former human presence family photo is on the wall dolls laying around other belongings strewn about as if the former occupants had just got up and walked away one day these remnants serve as an eerie and sad reminder of the human lives impacted by this tragedy but as you drive around you also realize that the landscape isn't a barren wasteland like most of us might have perceived but instead has a feeling of a National Park where you're the only visitor Nature has begun to reclaim the land with trees growing in cities forests regrowing in abandoned fields it has this creepy feeling of a glimpse into a future world without humans and as you drive around you often see animals like wild boar deer and moose out into many fields and marshes and if you're really lucky you might get a glimpse at a European bison or pres Wolski's horse two species introduced into Chernobyl after the accident to help with conservation efforts for the species the purse wall skis horse is actually one of the most endangered mammals on earth an animal so rare it was extinct in the wild just a few decades ago a population now lives inside true Noble but what was most eye-opening to me on that first visit was the evidence of wolves large populations of top predators don't exist in areas without abundant prey so this was really the point that it hit me that this image or perception of Chernobyl that I had might not be a reality and as we began to collect and analyze more data we continued to stumble upon new discoveries that would redefine our perception of Chernobyl based on hundreds of miles of transects that were surveyed counting tracks of animals ranging from rabbits all the way enough to moose none of the 17 species documented were influenced by radiation levels in terms of their populations we find them in similar numbers throughout the exclusion zone including some of the most contaminated areas so we began other studies one of which involved placing remote cameras throughout the exclusion zone the survey for secretive nocturnal species like wolves and other carnivores and we also began collecting scat which were analyzing with genetics to determine the density of carnivores across this landscape and while we were doing this I had one of those moments that we all too haven't have as scientists when I realized that what I do is just a little weird to people sometimes as I looked over at our driver and he had this strange expression on his face when he realized not only had these crazy Americans just flown halfway across the world to collect poop but we were genuinely excited to be doing this maybe it's the scientist in me as well but to suspense an excitement of putting out these remote cameras and later downloading the images is truly exhilarating I can still recall looking through our first batch of photos scrolling through hundreds of images of wild boar wolves and other animals images like these an analysis of these data would again show radiation has no impact on where we find them we simply find them where they're suitable habitat but the finding that has really stuck with me throughout this entire process is that we've discovered there are several times more wolves in Chernobyl than any of the other nature reserves we've studied in the region and ironically the population is concentrated towards the interior generally more contaminated parts of Chernobyl in fact we've now captured a number of wolves in Chernobyl and fit them with a unique type of tracking device that we helped develop that not only tells us where these animals are throughout the day but the radiation exposure as well and these collars have confirmed that a number of wolves do concentrate their activity towards the interior highly contaminated parts of Chernobyl collectively what this information suggests it's not only our wolves apparently deliberately avoiding areas closer to people but that Chernobyl appears to be serving as a sanctuary for many of these large mammals in the region despite the contamination the Fukushima accident is much more recent in our history and we've just begun to do studies there in the last few months so it's too early to say with certainty but what I can't tell you is that we're seeing an abundance of an incredible diversity of animals there even in some of the more contaminated areas and we're also seeing evidence these animals are reproducing and raising young and just like Chernobyl the population of wild boar has increased so substantially since humans have abandoned the land it's actually become necessary to control their populations in parts of the exclusion zone to reduce the damages that they're causing and one thing that I found fascinating about both Chernobyl and Fukushima is how the animals have adapted to her absence species like these Japanese macaques here are now regularly seen utilizing houses and other abandoned structures now that humans are no longer there there are many lessons that we've learned from these nuclear accidents both as researchers and as society and in my opinion we have a long ways to go especially in understanding health impacts of chronic radiation exposure but to me what the wildlife of Chernobyl demonstrate is the resiliency of ecosystems Chernobyl is one of the most contaminated places on earth yet wildlife in some cases are thriving simply because we're not there and their habitats being restored if any of you have ever been to Yellowstone or other national parks you understand that when we protect large areas of habitat and manage it well wildlife can thrive but as humans we've now modified more than half of Earth's land surface most in the last few hundred years and because of habitat loss and other human factors current species extinction rates are 1,000 times normal background levels what scientists call a global biodiversity crisis now many of these species are small and many haven't even been discovered yet so they have seemingly little importance or relevance to you or I but there are real concerns that some of the planet's most iconic species Siberian tiger the Emir leopard the mountain gorilla and white rhino just to name a few are on the brink of extinction some of these species may go extinct within our lifetimes without some substantial changes but plants and animals don't just provide us with aesthetic value we depend on many of them as important sources of food and medicine and with each extinction we lose the potential opportunity to discover cures for devastating diseases like cancer in the u.s. more than half of the most commonly prescribed drugs are linked to compounds found in nature and one example that really resonates with me is the rosy periwinkle species of plant you may have heard of found in Madagascar once was at risk of extinction due to deforestation chemical is extracted from this plant increased the survival rate of children with leukemia from 10 to more than 90 percent just imagine if we had let this species go extinct before that discovery so let me leave you with these few final thoughts there's little disagreement that elevated extinction rates are real and that habitat loss is largely to blame it's ironic that these wolf pups here born in one of the most contaminated places on earth probably have a higher chance of survival than pups born a few dozen miles away in areas still dominated by a human presence the question we need to ask ourselves is how much of Earth's biodiversity are we willing to witness disappear on our watch if we don't begin to make changes in how we utilize the remaining space we have left on this planet animals we depend on now or in the future as important sources of food and medicine will continue to disappear and animals like the tiger and Rhino could become the next dodo and passenger pigeon at a time when wildlife have seemingly so many things working against them this story that I share with you of the wildlife of Chernobyl is a nice silver lining but to me also serves as a sobering reminder of the impacts humans have on ecosystems just by carrying out our day-to-day lives often unknowingly and unintentionally our simple presence and use of a landscape can in some cases be more detrimental to the long-term survival of a species than a nuclear accident but working in Chernobyl has also renewed an optimism in me that preservation of biodiversity is possible as long as we can protect enough habitat obviously we need to strike a balance between the needs of people and the needs of animals but I'm confident that together we to develop creative solutions to meet both the needs of people and the needs of animals so that wildlife can be around for us to enjoy utilize and benefit from for many generations to come thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 189,128

Rating: 4.697145 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Science (hard), Adventure, Animals, Biodiversity, Biology, Conservation, Deextinction, Environment, Ethics, Life, Sustainability

Id: iXAsirlbFFw

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 15 2016

Reddit Comments

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Yeah the Liquidators did an excellent job