If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. Join one million Future fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter or Instagram. This article originally appeared on The Conversation, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence. In driving ourselves away from the area, we have created space for nature to return. Harmful as it was, the nuclear accident was far less destructive to the local ecosystem than we were. In a way, the Chernobyl disaster reveals the true extent of our environmental impact on the planet. Now essentially one of Europe’s largest nature preserves, the ecosystem around the wrecked power plant supports more life than before, even if each individual cycle of that life lasts a little less. Levels of natural radiation on the Earth’s surface were much higher in the distant past when early plants were evolving, so plants in the exclusion zone may be drawing upon adaptations dating back to this time in order to survive.Ĭrucially, the burden brought by radiation at Chernobyl is less severe than the benefits reaped from humans leaving the area. Interestingly, in addition to this innate resilience to radiation, some plants in the Chernobyl exclusion zone seem to be using extra mechanisms to protect their DNA, changing its chemistry to make it more resistant to damage, and turning on systems to repair it if this doesn’t work. Nor are such tumours fatal in the vast majority of cases, because the plant can find ways to work around the malfunctioning tissue. Chernobyl’s radioactive material is “unstable” because it is constantly firing out high energy particles and waves that smash cellular structures or produce reactive chemicals which attack the cells’ machinery.Īll of this means that plants can replace dead cells or tissues much more easily than animals, whether the damage is due to being attacked by an animal or to radiation.Īnd while radiation and other types of DNA damage can cause tumours in plants, mutated cells are generally not able to spread from one part of the plant to another as cancers do, thanks to the rigid, interconnecting walls surrounding plant cells. To answer this question, we first need to understand how radiation from nuclear reactors affects living cells.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |