Radiation. Most of us mistakenly believe that it only came about through human activity. This is not true. Radiation has always existed. According to some theories, thanks to her, life arose on our planet.
However, in large doses, it is not just dangerous - radiation is destructive for all living things! According to researchers, it has already destroyed several civilizations that lived long before us.
It is impossible to know the enemy by sight
To begin with, a small educational program. Any kind of radiation falls under the definition of radiation: infrared (thermal), ultraviolet (solar radiation), visible light radiation. But only one type - ionizing radiation - carries a serious danger, invading any matter in its path, ionizing and thereby destroying it. Ionizing radiation knows no barriers: neither concrete, nor iron, nor any other material can contain its spread. That is why the high radioactive background is so dangerous - you can neither hide nor hide from it.
Radiation is everywhere. We literally bathe in it from birth to death, and even radiate it ourselves. The greatest source of radiation is the Sun. Our star is actually a giant hydrogen bomb. It emits not only photons in a wide range, but also a mass of ions, as well as gamma radiation. Astronauts know this well. Even the thick walls of the spacecraft are unable to protect from the radiation coming from our star. This is one of the reasons why special protective suits are sewn for astronauts.
Up to 14% of radiation penetrates from space to Earth. And even the ozone layer, designed to protect against radiation, does not quite cope with its task. In addition, as we know, it tends to thin out and break down from time to time.
Promotional video:
Atom-kul
The first nuclear explosion on the territory of the USSR was carried out on August 29, 1949, and the last on October 24, 1990. The nuclear test program lasted 41 years 1 month 26 days. During this time, 715 nuclear explosions were made, both for peaceful purposes and military. The power of the exploded charges corresponds to several tens of thousands of bombs dropped on Hiroshima. The first bomb was detonated at the Semipalatinsk test site, the last at the Northern test site Novaya Zemlya.
Both proving grounds received approximately the same number of trials. However, the Semipalatinsk test site is considered to be more populated. Barnaul is 500 kilometers away, Pavlodar, Eki-bastuz and Karaganda are 250 kilometers away, and the city of scientists Kurchatov is 60 kilometers away. And in 1954, the city of Chagan was founded 80 kilometers from Semipalatinsk.
But these are not all "new formations"! In 1965, in the area of the Semipalatinsk test site, Lake Chagan was artificially created. Before that, a 170-kiloton thermonuclear charge was placed in the bed of the small river Chaganka. In the early morning of January 15, 1965, the earth swung sharply and reared up. The charge laid at a depth - nine Hiroshima - broke the ground.
Lake Chagan
Boulders weighing about a ton scattered 8 kilometers. A cloud of dust covered the horizon for several days. For several nights in a row, the sky glowed with a crimson glow. A crater with a diameter of about 500 meters and a depth of up to 100 meters with melted obsidian edges formed at the site of the explosion. The size of the rock heap around the crater reached 40 meters.
An official report, recently declassified, read:
“Immediately after the explosion, a dome of shattered soil began to rise. In 2-5 seconds after the explosion, a breakthrough of incandescent gases was noted, and the formation of a cloud began, which stabilized after five minutes at an altitude of 4,800 meters. The crushed part of the soil, reaching a maximum height of 950 meters, began to sink … After an underground test codenamed "Chagan", the territory of 11 settlements with a total population of 2,000 people was exposed to radioactive contamination …"
The level of gamma radiation at the edges of the funnel by the end of the first day was 30 R / h, after 10 days it dropped to 1 R / h, and now it is 2,000-3,000 μR / h (the natural radioactive background in this area is 15-30 μR / h).
This is how the Peaceful Atom program began in the USSR. Meanwhile, Soviet newspapers wrote: “As a result, the beautiful Chagan lake with clean transparent water was created. The area has changed. On the shore, we found large transparent crystals of gypsum, which were opened by an explosion … An event that had been waiting for so long happened. The heat was usual for these places. People were exhausted. True, it was a little cooler on the shore, but how attracted this serene water surface! Truly, the elbow is close, but you won't bite … Finally, the doctors gave the go-ahead, and all the inhabitants of the village ran to the beach. We swam for a long time, heartily … Soviet journalists were able to embellish reality! In reality, everything was different.
Lake Chagan
Scientists understood that if flood waters carry radioactive dust scattered over a large area into the Irtysh River, the huge Siberian waterway will be contaminated for a long time, which will cause irreparable damage. Back in January, it was decided: to punch a channel in the crater wall and block the Chaganka river bed with an earthen dam in order not to let the deadly water into the Irtysh and create a lake in the crater.
Here is how one of its participants, Vladimir Vasilyevich Zhirov, at that time a master in the “mailbox”, described the events of those days: “In January we moved from Ust-Kamenogorsk to Semipalatinsk, and from there to the place of the explosion. The boardwalk residential town is located five kilometers from the epicenter. In the booths there is an iron stove-stove, but forty-degree frosts took their toll. The place of the explosion is monstrous, it is the fear of God. I walked there - blood gushed out through my nose, and my throat scraped like emery. I pulled the "petal" off my face - my clothes were covered in blood, I was suffocating, but I had to go. We worked honestly, did not spare ourselves. One bulldozer driver, saving the car, dived with a rope into the atomic water. The bulldozer saved, and he died a short time later. I came out of the ashes with chronic rewards - nosebleeds, pancreatic disease, bronchitis, cholecystitis,hepatitis … Out of 300 liquidators, less than 30 people survived”.
But the liquidators coped with the task. Many - at the cost of their own lives. So in the Kazakh steppes there appeared an everlasting lake 100 meters deep and 450 in diameter. Locals call it Atom-Kul - an atomic lake. If you look at Chagan from a bird's eye view, it amazes with its regular forms. Nature creates these very rarely. But as a result of atomic explosions, it is precisely such lakes that are obtained - even and round.
From the media: “Since radiobiology at that time was in its infancy, they acted mainly by the“scientific poke”method. That is, for a number of years, the lake has been randomly populated with species uncharacteristic for the local flora and fauna. Biologists hoped that with a wide variety of test material, they would find the organism most susceptible to mutagenic effects of residual radiation.
Since the end of the 60s, the experimental biological station at Atom-Kol has carried out a number of experiments to study the effect of residual radiation on living organisms. For several years, 36 species of fish (including even Amazonian piranhas), 27 species of mollusks, 32 species of amphibians, 11 species of reptiles, 8 species of mammals, 42 species of invertebrates and almost 150 species of plants, including algae, have been inhabited in the lake.
Almost all of these species were uncharacteristic for the local fauna, and 90% of the organisms died. The survivors showed an abnormal number of mutations and a change in appearance in the offspring.
Biologists have noted an abnormal number of mutations, abrupt changes in the appearance and behavior of species.
So, the well-known carp in the Chagan Lake is a typical predator, and the usual freshwater crayfish has increased enormously in size, becoming more like its oceanic counterpart - a large yellow lobster. Many genetically close species gave rise to joint offspring, and, conversely, other populations followed different paths of development, giving species that were completely different either from each other or from their ancestors."
Round as a saucer
In 1971, a perfectly round lake appeared in the middle of a forest near the Pechora-Kama canal. There are not one or two such strange bodies of water on the territory of the former USSR. Their origin is usually vague. Most often they are called karst lakes. However, such lakes are often formed not only in places composed of water-soluble rocks. Take Dead Lake 20 kilometers from Penza. Not only is it absolutely round, but also spilled in the middle of peat bogs.
There is a version that the Dead Lake appeared as a result of peat mining. If this is the case, then the peat miners turned out to be not only wonderful designers who managed to turn a banal quarry into a geometrically correct basin, but also carefully enclose the lake with a high bank. This embankment supposedly protects the reservoir from erosion of peat, but in reality resembles the release of soil from the funnel of a nuclear explosion. Near the Dead Lake, which is freely spread in the middle of the Penza forest, there are twin brothers: Devil's Lake, Lake Shaitan, Lake Adovo, numerous funnel lakes in the Kirov region.
Curious Chukhloma lake in the Kostroma region. Its diameter is about 10 kilometers. This could be formed as a result of a powerful air nuclear explosion, probably more than 100 Mt. The epicenter was supposed to be located several kilometers above the surface. Under such conditions, the shock wave pushes the soil tens of meters into the depth, but its ejection does not occur. Explosions of this kind are used to destroy ground objects and the population over a large area with a radius of about 1,000-2,000 kilometers.
Chukhloma lake (in winter)
On the territory of the former USSR, there are a huge number of such reservoirs. Some, like Lake Chagan, are unsuitable for life. Local Kazakhs, seeing sellers with meter-long carp in the market of Semipalatinsk, bypass them. They know something: carp, similar to sharks, are found only in one body of water - in the Atomic Lake, contaminated with radiation to this day. But other lakes, such as, for example, Chukhlomskoye, pose no danger either to humans or fish.
If we assume that such lakes were formed as a result of a nuclear explosion, then it should have happened a long time ago. Indeed, many scientists are inclined to believe that the Earth has already undergone a nuclear explosion, which killed all living things, including humans. It took the planet several million years to recover from this shock. It is believed that the ancient Sumerian civilization died because nuclear bombs fell on the Sumerian cities.
Here is how this catastrophe is described on ancient clay tablets: “Sumer suffered a severe catastrophe, a huge hurricane that came from nowhere swept away the cities, after which a fiery wind rose. The sun did not shine during the day, and the moon did not shine at night, there were no stars to be seen. The air became poisoned, plants did not grow, the cities became empty and deserted."
A similar picture is drawn by archaeologists excavating the so-called Harappan culture in India. According to scientists, the ancients could have died several thousand years ago … from a nuclear explosion. The Englishman D. Davenport devoted more than one year to the study of ancient civilization. In 1996, he made the sensational announcement that the center of the Harappan culture was destroyed about 2,000 BC by a nuclear explosion.
Ionizing radiation occurs as a result of the radioactive decay of the nuclei of some elements and, depending on the particles that make up it, is divided into two types: short-wave electromagnetic radiation (X-rays, gamma radiation) and corpuscular radiation, which is a stream of particles (alpha particles, beta -particles (electrons), neutrons, protons, heavy ions and others). The most common are alpha, beta, gamma and x-rays.
In ancient Indian scriptures, more than 94 types of nuclear weapons called brahmahstra are mentioned. To activate it, it was enough to read a special mantra. Mention of this can be found in the ancient epic "Mahabharata".
The Buryats, Khakass, Evenks and Tuvans have legends about Tsolmon, the master of Venus. Being in the sky, he could cause war on Earth - dropping bombs on our planet. And such myths are endless. What is behind them, scientists have yet to find out. But if little is left of the ancient civilizations, then ideally round lakes will help them.
Sergey SHAPOVALOV