[Animals] These four animals are radioactive but are they dangerous?

[FNX Magokiler]

For sea turtles, there are few habitats more perfect than the cold Pacific waters surrounding the green Enewetak Atoll, halfway between Australia and Hawaii.

Perfect, except for the radiation that invades it. After capturing the atoll during World War II, the United States tested nuclear weapons there 43 times, then buried the resulting radioactive waste in a concrete grave that has since begun to leak.

Now scientists have discovered the nuclear signature of waste in the shells of sea turtles living in the surrounding waters, making turtles one of many animals affected by global nuclear contamination.

From tropical oceans to the forests of Germany and the mountains of Japan, radiation from nuclear tests and disasters is showing up in wildlife around the world. Although radiation from these animals does not typically threaten humans, they are a testament to humanity's nuclear legacy.

"It's a cautionary tale," says Georg Steinhauser, a radiochemist at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria and an expert on animal radioactivity. "Nature does not forget."

(Related: Are the Chernobyl wolves spreading their mutations?)

Enewetak Atoll Sea Turtles

 

Much of the world's radioactive contamination comes from testing by world powers rushing to develop powerful weapons during the 20th century. The United States tested nuclear weapons from 1948 to 1958 at Enewetak Atoll.

In 1977, the United States began cleaning the atoll of radioactive waste, most of which is buried in concrete on one of the islands. Researchers studying the turtles' nuclear signatures speculate that the cleanup disturbed contaminated sediments that had settled in the atoll's lagoon. They believe these sediments were ingested by the turtles while swimming, or that they affected the algae that make up much of the sea turtles' diet.

The sea turtle studied in the work was found just a year after the cleanup began. According to Cyler Conrad, a researcher at the US Pacific Northwest National Laboratory who led the study, traces of radiation present in the sediments were deposited in the turtle's shell in layers that scientists were able to measure.

Conrad compared turtles to "swimming tree rings," which used their shell to measure radiation in the same way that the rings in a tree's trunk record its age.

"I had no idea how widespread those nuclear signals are in the environment," says Conrad, who also studied turtles with signs of human radiation across the United States in the Mohave Desert, the Savannah River in South Carolina and the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee. "So many different turtles at so many different sites were shaped by the nuclear activity that occurred in those places."

 

https://www.nationalgeographic.es/animales/2023/09/animales-radiactivos-peligrosos-causas