Decomposers and Radiation

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Chilling to see the results of Chernobyl still working themselves out in the natural world…

“Apart from a few ants, the dead tree trunks were largely unscathed when we first encountered them,” says Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, and lead author of the study. “It was striking, given that in the forests where I live, a fallen tree is mostly sawdust after a decade of lying on the ground.”

Forests Around Chernobyl Aren’t Decaying Properly: Smithsonian Magazine