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towns and villages surrounding the plant. The mas sive release of radiation into the environment was unprecedented in human history. The reactor burned for ten days, and the smoke contained deadly compounds, such as uranium, plutonium, iodine 131, strontium 90, and cesium 137. In Ukraine alone, more than 4,000 people who worked to clean up the site have died of radiation-induced diseases. Of Ukraine’s 50 million people, about 3.4 million (among them 1.3 million children) were exposed to radiation. Nor did the effects stop at the Ukrainian border. The toxic cloud was blown to the north and the west, contaminating thousands of square miles of land not only in Ukraine, but also in Belarus (which was affected by 60% of the fallout), Russia, Poland, Sweden, Germany, and other countries. Higher levels of radiation were measured world wide. Where this toxic material landed, everything was contaminated: the water, the soil, the plants, the animals, and the people. Twenty years after the disaster (with the entire power plant finally shut down), the concrete that was poured over the disabled reactor is deterio rating. As this occurs, contaminated substances in side the reactor may soon begin to leak out, exacer bating an already horrific problem. Statistics tell part of the story. About 20,000 square miles of land in Ukraine, one-tenth of the land in a country smaller than the State of Texas, still remains uninhabitable. About 1,400 square miles of land immediately around the ac cident site is so contaminated that all the people have been evacuated and their once busy com munities are now ghost towns. No cattle or agricul ture can survive here. Hundreds of villages, schools, and factories remain abandoned. The area is sur rounded by barbed wire fences and is patrolled by guards. It is called “the Zone,” and it will be unfit for human habitation for centuries. As a Ukrainian American growing up in the United States, I heard a lot about the Chomobyl nuclear power plant accident. At the time, the best I could do was read about it and try to understand what had happened, why it had happened, and what the aftermath might be. Since that time, I have discovered that scientific tools, which can be uti lized not only to look at the problems quailtatively but also quantitatively, can answer some of these questions. One of these tools is remote sensing through satellite images, a technology that provides some remarkable insights. Since the topic of interest here is long-term effects of radioactive contamination of a large area, a comparison of satellite images of the same area taken years apart provides an excellent basis for drawing meaningful conclusions. Images taken of the same location in 1985 and 1989 show a great change in the level of human activity, especially with respect to cultivation of farmland. The dif ference is striking. The Chomobyl reactor complex is at the northwest end of an 11.5-kilometer long cooling pond. Right next to the power plant is the city Pripyat where 48,000 people once lived. Today, Pripyat is a ghost town. It was evacuated in 1986; three years later, nature began to reclaim the land. Satellite imaging shows that this region diminished in “brightness” from 1985 to 1989 and the “bright” urban signature on the satellite images decreased significantly. To translate this into layman’s terms, white patches on these images indicate highly re flective bare ground; a collage of bright red indi cates growing crops. Images from 1989 reveal many fewer cultivated areas than images from 1985. These areas have reverted back to the wild, and what was once a mosaic of white and red has turned a brownish-green shade. There are few white areas left because open ground, usually indicating human changes to the environment by cutting back vege tation, is now covered by weeds. The one exception is the white crescent northwest of the cooling pond: a series of levees, dams, and other structures built to prevent contaminated runoff water from entering the rivers and poisoning other cities’ water supplies. Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, lies just downstream. In close-ups of the region to the west of the power plant, the changes are especially noticeable. Here, town and farmland have clearly been taken over by nature. To assess this change quantitatively, a nor malized vegetation index (NDVI) was performed to gauge the changing level of agricultural activity. Overall, the NDVI showed a 10 to 30 percent decline in agriculture from 1985 to 1989. While agriculture declined significantly as villages were abandoned, nature has slowly been taking back the land. Plant life in the area is still toxic, but even though mutation levels are high, plant and animal populations are increasing. What humans have
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