An international team of scientists has shown that large amounts of radioactive particles left over from nuclear weapons tests can be released from the continuing melting of glaciers.
Not so long ago, in the journal Nature, new data appeared on the rate of glacier melting. The authors analyzed the state of about 19 thousand glaciers in the world and showed that they are dying even faster than previously thought. From 1961 to 2016, the global mass of ice shrank by 10.6 trillion tons, and today they are losing 335 million tons annually. These processes are fraught with many severe and even dangerous consequences. One of them drew attention to the geographers of the University of Plymouth, whose work was told by Caroline Clason, who spoke in Vienna at the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).
Scientists examined glaciers in different regions - the Alps, the Caucasus, Canadian British Columbia, Antarctica and the Arctic (in Greenland, Iceland and on the island of Spitsbergen). The authors looked for radioactive particles in cryoconite - the smallest dust that constantly settles on the surface of ice and is stored in them. Radionuclides were found in 17 sites - ten times the amount in the vicinity of glaciers. According to scientists, these ices turned out to be one of the most radiation-polluted places on the planet, in addition to limited zones of severe contamination.
It is obvious that the pollution is associated with numerous tests and explosions that were carried out until the 1960s, as well as with a number of large-scale disasters, including Chernobyl and Fukushima. When released during melting, radionuclides can enter the organisms of living beings; for example, the especially dangerous americium-241 dissolves easily in water and can enter the food chain with it - up to humans.
Sergey Vasiliev