“Bomb Carbon” Has Been Found in Deep-Ocean Creatures

A group of scientists have now found radioactive carbon-14—at levels high enough to indicate it originated from the detonation of nuclear bombs—in the flesh of shrimplike crustaceans living in the trench. And in fact, testing for the new study showed that the waters of the trench did have low levels of carbon-14—which is what the researchers expected, given the long travel time from atmosphere to deep ocean. Together with the results from the Mariana Trench, these findings “prove that atmospheric and oceanic circulation distribute bomb-derived radioactivity globally, even to the most remote sites,” says Edyta Lokas of the Institute of Nuclear Physics PAS in Krakow, Poland, who worked on the glacier research, which was presented at a meeting of the European Geoscience Union (EGU) in April.

Source: www.scientificamerican.com