Global warming and melting of the ice cover will release radioactive substances.steemCreated with Sketch.

in #nature5 years ago

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The effects of global warming can be more frightening for humanity than we thought. Researchers are worried that the melting of glaciers will release radioactive substances into the atmosphere.

It is no secret that during the Second World War the United States, Russia and many other countries around the world tested nuclear weapons on a massive scale. There were thousands of such larger and smaller explosions, and the radiation resulting from them spread throughout the entire planet in the atmosphere and dropped to the ground, eg with rain. The same was true of the nuclear accident in Chernobyl, Tree Mile Island and Fukushima.

Added to this is the fact that Russia carried out a large number of tests in the Arctic and permafrost areas in remote Siberia. Highly radioactive substances in the natural form and waste so far were hidden in the ice cover and were not a direct threat to humanity. This situation, however, began to change.

An international research team has carried out analyzes in several different places on our planet, where there are areas with unnaturally elevated radiation as a result of human activity, to find out whether climate change and melting of the ice cover will release radioactive elements into the atmosphere and spread them around the world.

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Global warming and melting of the ice cover will release radioactive substances. Fig. US Department from Defense.

It turns out that such a frightening scenario has already begun to be implemented in many places around the world. The increase in average air temperatures in the Arctic and other parts of the planet causes the thawing of permafrost, in which since the last ice age there have been huge amounts of biomass from dead plants and radioactive materials from the last 74 years. The melting ice-cover preserving them activates the process of faster decomposition of biomass, ie the release of enormous amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, and with them radioactive elements. Gases additionally accelerate the progress of warming, so we are dealing here with a chain reaction.

Scientists believe that the greatest threat is to Americium-241, which is a synthetic chemical element, which is characterized by a half-life of up to 432 years. When nuclear tests lasted several decades ago, radioactive substances were successively stored on ice. Now, in a short time, they can all re-enter the atmosphere and create health risks for billions of people living on the entire planet.

Source: GeekWeek.pl/PopularMechanics
Photo: MaxPixel / US Department from Defense

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