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August 22, 2023
By Meghan Bartels
The invention of the atom bomb has shaped both history and ecosystems across the globe. Its far-reaching impacts have even led scientists to consider using the signature of nuclear weapons to mark a new geologic age, the Anthropocene. Now a new study has shown that turtles taken from nuclear production and detonation sites encode the history of these weapons in their shell.
Using a special mass spectrometer, a device that detects the chemical makeup of a material, scientists detected minuscule levels of uranium in the shells of four turtles, including one sea and one tortoise, that lived near such sites before they were collected as natural history specimens between the 1950s and 1980s. In these samples—two taken from production sites and two taken from detonation sites—the scientists matched the signatures of uranium isotopes in the shells to the distinct profiles produced by each of these two types of nuclear activity. ...
By Meghan Bartels
The invention of the atom bomb has shaped both history and ecosystems across the globe. Its far-reaching impacts have even led scientists to consider using the signature of nuclear weapons to mark a new geologic age, the Anthropocene. Now a new study has shown that turtles taken from nuclear production and detonation sites encode the history of these weapons in their shell.
Using a special mass spectrometer, a device that detects the chemical makeup of a material, scientists detected minuscule levels of uranium in the shells of four turtles, including one sea and one tortoise, that lived near such sites before they were collected as natural history specimens between the 1950s and 1980s. In these samples—two taken from production sites and two taken from detonation sites—the scientists matched the signatures of uranium isotopes in the shells to the distinct profiles produced by each of these two types of nuclear activity. ...
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