What Happens Inside Earth's Forbidden Zones?

0:01Welcome to The Rest of Science. I'm Hannah Fry. And I'm Michael Stevens. And I've got a little treat for you today because we've got a field notes episode, as usual, this part of the week. A little bit later on, we're going to come to your questions, your big ideas, your interjections that you wanted to send us at restofscience.goldhunger.com. But right now, I've got a little object for you, Michael. I love the field notes where you bring the object because I get to just be an audience member for a while, you know? You genuinely don't know what's coming up. I thrive when I don't know what's going on.

0:33Okay, should I give you an audio clue first? Yes, please do. I'll be honest with you. If you get this from the audio clue, I think there's a 0 % chance. I think there's a 0 % chance that you're going to get this from the audio clue. Okay, now you've got me really, really interested. I'm going to see if I can crack this with just the audio. Okay, you ready? It sounds like a baby's rattle type toy, like keys on a plastic key chain. I want to say a plasticky sound. It wasn't like metal unless it was hollow metal. I think it's more like metal on glass. Well, you know what it is though. What the heck?

1:09Sorry. It's like something rolling around in something hollow, like a ball in a ball. Okay, look, obviously, that's the absolute closest you're going to get because what it actually is is a bit of barbed wire in a glass jar. Oh. Why do I have a bit of barbed wire in a glass jar? I don't know. It looks strange. Doesn't it? Looks very strange indeed. This is a bit of barbed wire from the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. If you're only listening, Hannah is holding a glass jar that's kind of a little taller than a film canister, but about as wide, if you're old enough to remember what those are.

1:49And it's got like a cork at the top, but inside there's a little snipping, a little piece of barbed wire and like some rocks. There is a gift shop at the DMZ. I didn't know that. Is that not the craziest thing you've ever heard? And I'm not talking about like, oh, you're away from the demilitarized zone. No, no, no, no, no. I mean, literally, in the demilitarized zone, there is a fun fair. Oh, that makes so much sense, though, because so many tourists to South Korea would be like, I want to go up there and see North Korea with my eyes, and I've got money to spend. Uh-huh. I bet they're just putting up new barbed wire every day and then clipping it up.

2:29Just to take the old stuff down.

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4:20The other things that you could buy, by the way, are the DMZ. I sort of feel a bit funny playing Z, but it also doesn't sound right to say DMZ. The other things that you could buy at the DMZ gift shop are wallets that are shaped like hand grenades and then all kinds of like little figurines of North Korean leaders that I think possibly the North Korean leaders would not enjoy. But you know, the people who own those gift shops, they're lobbying both countries very hard to keep this demilitarized zone going because their business depends upon the political situation. You are absolutely right. And they're not the only ones who are desperate to keep this war going.

5:06Because actually what I want to talk to you about today is not the gift shop at the DMZ. It is the animals that have flourished in the no-go zone that has been created by human intervention. And there's a few of these places around the world, right? The DMZ is one of them, which has basically been completely unoccupied by humans since the 1950s. And in the decades that have passed since, there is this complete flourishing of nature within that zone in this crazy way. So nobody can step foot in this zone. Yeah. Certainly not. You certainly wouldn't be authorized to do so. Right. I mean, you can, but you may not.

5:52You may not. You may not. And also it would be extremely ill-advised because the entire place is totally covered in landmines. Yeah. So also you would not and should not. Okay, good. You may not, you should not, and you could not. Pieces of you might make it over. So even conservationists are not able to go into this zone in order to do proper surveys of the animals that are there. So then what flourishes? So there's all kinds of bird species. There are rumors that there are leopards and tigers that have found a home within this region. no tiger there's no sort of really good evidence of any tiger haven't been spotted um so i think that one might be a myth uh but um there are boars there are uh deer there are uh vampire deer in fact which um which don't grow horns they grow sort of like funny teeth oh wow but the other thing is all of these paddy fields that were abandoned wait paddy fields like i know about how long the demilitarized zone is, but how thick is it?

7:02How wide across? Only about four kilometers. Okay. So you've got a four kilometer band separating North and South Korea where people may, should, and could not enter. Nature is healing there in its own way. And it's healing really well, by the way. There's some estimates that say 38 % of the critically endangered species in Korea live in that tiny little area. Whoa. So it's not just the gift shop owners who are desperate for this place, not for the war to never end. You know, if suddenly there was a peace treaty and everybody, there was a reunited Korea or however it ended up being sold, it would just be devastating for their ecosystem that has been created in this abandoned land right it would be completely devastating the paddy fields by the way that were abandoned in the 1950s they turned over very quickly into grassland and then they uh very quickly from then started growing willow and now all of these paddy fields have turned into these elder dominated forests so you get these little pockets and it's just this amazing study that you can make in what happens when humans completely vacate an area.

8:21It's like really extraordinary just how much nature thrives. And it's different than what's going on in Chernobyl because there you have the added variable of radiation. Exactly. We've talked about the black frogs that you see in Chernobyl, how the radiation has ended up impacting the evolutionary path of different creatures that are there, that frogs with darker skin were able to survive the radiation better than those that didn't those that didn't would die out and uh and so the closer you get to the original site in Chernobyl the darker the frogs get um there are places that are sort of in the middle so I was incredibly lucky to get to go to the DMZ when I was filming a documentary I've also been inside the exclusion zone of Fukushima which is somewhere between the two so it has the radiation element that Chernobyl has, but nowhere near the same sort of scale, right?

9:17And it's Chernobyl is like there's certain parts of Chernobyl that will never be inhabitable by humans, right? There's no, there's no going there ever. But in Fukushima, the idea is that slowly, slowly, they are trying to decrease the radius of how far people are not allowed in. So it's sort of like a, it's it's not never uh but how do we say it for for the dmc you can't you shouldn't you won't or something you yeah you may not you should not and you cannot right so from fukushima it's more like you may not you probably should not and you can maybe in future essentially all right it's a little more hopeful a little more hopeful tell me about fukushima all right so here's the thing okay Anyway, going inside Fukushima is, it's wild.

10:10It's really wild. So describe it for me because I've never been there. It is an area of land. So you are just inside of the coast in Japan where the tsunami basically overwhelmed the sea wall of a power plant. A nuclear power plant. A nuclear power plant, important distinction. flooded the reactor and caused radiation to spill out essentially in the surrounding area. So it remains very radioactive, nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl, but really dangerous still. And when you go in there, so we didn't get to go right up to the reactor, but we got to go in the sort of the controlled zone. And when you go in, there are human settlements within that region that were abandoned on the day and have never been returned to.

10:58Not only has the forest and nature essentially reclaimed these buildings and sort of swallowed them up from the ground and around. The roof is caving in, there's rubble everywhere. Just the elements have had their way essentially with these buildings. But you also, where they are closed off and locked away, you look inside the windows and you get this sense of the panic people felt when they left on that day. And for context, this was 15 years ago. It was 15 years ago, right, exactly. So that's how long humans have left it abandoned to nature. Or the other way around is to say that's how quickly it gets swallowed by nature, how quickly nature returns to dominance.

11:44You look in the window and you see the slippers of people sort of rushed as they were leaving and they were putting their shoes back on to get out of the building. There's like teddy bears kind of strewn on the side. there was one place where I looked in the window and there was like a crate of half empty beers that they must have been aiming to take to the recycling but then never had the opportunity to do so and when we got to go inside this exclusion zone we were going for this story about rewilding and we spoke to some researchers and they told us that there were some radioactive bears within the exclusion zone we were going to go and film these radioactive bears and then when we got there we realized there'd be the slight mistranslation because it wasn't it wasn't radioactive bears it was boars oh okay still fun still fine but also it wasn't boars so much as boar singular and actually it only ever been caught on capital once so instead we filmed some radioactive dragonflies which um which was you know a close second so they're radioactive in that they are themselves radioactive.

12:50If they land on you, you're exposed to ionizing radiation from the body of the dragonfly. I don't think within Fukushima, it's quite that extreme. Okay, so it's more like dragonflies that live in an exclusion zone. Exactly right. But what I sort of started thinking was how many of these different exclusion zones there are around the world, how many different places are now completely untouchable because of human decisions, human moments. So you've got Chernobyl, of course, Fukushima. There's also a place called Lake Karache in Russia. And this is a place that the lake shore, sort of this, you know, around this little lake it read around 600 ronken in 1990 which is basically you stay there for an hour and you're dead okay that's kind of the level that we're talking that's a lot this is where the um the russians were testing their nuclear nuclear weapons essentially um there's also the bikini atoll marshall islands where 23 different bombs between 1946 1958 were detonated still totally uninhabitable.

14:08And the problem there, it's not so much the ground, it's more about the food chain, because all in the coconut palms and the breadfruit, anything that's grown there will also carry a dose. So when you were saying about radioactive dragonflies, it's radioactive coconuts. Yes. And the people who used to live there still don't. Still don't. Right. I mean, astonishing. I mean, at the time, the US government really did think it was going to be temporary um they were like oh yeah you guys got to leave for a bit we'll do our tests and you can come back and now i think a lot of them are and their descendants are in like arkansas right and and the thing is i mean there's there's some of these places may eventually be re-inhabitable so you know bikini atoll for instance that researchers can go there it's it's not that you the sort of like passing dose isn't you if you're very careful and very you know take the correct precautions that it is possible to visit.

15:06But there are other places in Marshall Islands, the tomb, for example, where there is a concrete dome of 120 ,000 tons of plutonium contaminated debris. And also it's sort of cracking, which is obviously not bad. But that place is indefinitely. There's no going there ever. You know, it's just too much. And where is that? That's also Marshall Islands as well. Runet Island, it's called. And it's called the tomb. Oh, what's the island called? Runet Island. Runet Island. There are other places that are not just because of nuclear testing. So there is in Zone Rouge, it's called in France, which is it's still legally sealed after World War One.

15:50this is a place near verdun and uh 99 of the plants that grow there will die due to arsenic in the soil i mean we're talking great it's about 17 by weight in the soil right this is like it's horrendous so human um wandering around is excluded uh for good reason have they tried to do anything to fix this or are they just kind of leaving it just leaving it i think yeah someone in the comments may correct me but but my understanding is they're leaving in 1919 they were like look it's impossible to clean human life's impossible there don't even go there that was used in world war one and now it's just polluted this area of land so much that even the plants aren't they're not flourishing there no exactly maybe for their short lifetimes they are because there's no human development happening and that's one of the things that makes the DMZ so interesting because, I mean, they did spray with Agent Orange when the line was drawn in the map, essentially when this separation of North and South happened, which was when Japan evacuated Korea during the Second World War.

17:02And there were a couple of American generals who'd never been to Korea and needed to work out which bit the Soviets should take and which bits the Americans should take. And they just chose a line of latitude on the map, didn't take into account that there were railway lines going through there, there were rivers cutting across. It's just like, just kind of very bluntly and brutally. There was a bit of fighting for a few years, instantly until 1953, when they signed this peace treaty. Sorry, forgive me, it's not a peace treaty. Crucially, it's a ceasefire. So actually, they are still technically at war.

17:35But that was what really set the boundaries of these two. But that's sort of what makes it interesting is that it is a byproduct of war, but there aren't these things like anthrax, radiation, you know, all of these incredibly horrible arsenic or anything like that. There's none of these sort of incredible weapons of war that make it mean that their wildlife can't flourish. It's not polluted with a substance. There are landmines there. Those wouldn't affect a dragonfly or a plant but a tiger a tiger maybe maybe but we're not sure if there are tigers there or not we're not sure um so anyway i i guess the point about all of this stuff the thing that makes me it kind of gives me a little bit of hope in a weird way is that um in a sort of depressing way maybe but i think that we spend a lot of time talking about how oh the world might be over we talk in sort of apocalyptic terms about climate change about about nuclear war about about all of the potential things that we could destroy uh ourselves with but i think the thing is is that actually we are talking about ourselves right nature is going to be fine the world is going to be fine.

18:54Like it's really only us. And I think that we have this real habit of imagining that it's like human made and nature as though there's a separation and a distinction between us. But actually we are of this earth, right? It's like, we're just one little element of it. And if we leave, they're going to be fine. They're going to be absolutely fine. Yeah, humans are just one of the many kinds of animals on Earth. There are ways in which we have a responsibility that I don't hear discussed too often. For example, if an asteroid was hurtling towards Earth, it's not going to be the cows that save the planet.

19:38That's on us. Yeah. Yeah. And that could be genuinely apocalyptic. Yeah. For everything. That could genuinely end all life. It will come down to us and not the tree frogs. There is one place when I was looking for areas that are closed off to humans that you cannot go to. I did find one place that I think sounds really interesting. Okay. What is it? This is one of the few examples that has not been created as a result of war or fighting between humans. This is a place called Ilha de Cui Amada Grande, otherwise known as Snake Island in Brazil. This is a place that has got so many snakes on it that it was closed off to civilians in the 1920s and has never been reopened.

20:23It's a 43 hectare island holding around 4 ,000 vipers. Whoa. Oh. Each one of which has venom that is strong enough to kill you within an hour. Yeah. And so they get to live their own lives free from human intervention because we've just decided that that's how it's going to be. No thanks. I think they're also endangered. I think that's another point. This is like a particular place where they thrive and everyone's like, OK, let's just, should we just leave them? We'll just leave them alone. We'll just let them be. Let's just not go there. Yeah. All right. The snakes can have that. So maybe that's what life will be like after we wipe ourselves out.

21:04You know, the houses will be reclaimed by the forest within 15 years, swallowed by vines, and then eventually it will just be a snake planet. Yeah. Do you know what? I think I'm still a bit depressed about the mirrors from last episode. I think maybe I'm being a bit pessimistic. No, that's fair enough. How excluded does a place have to be? Like there are mountains that have still not been climbed because they are sacred to the native people. And in some cases, there are laws against anyone climbing those mountains. So, they're places where nature can be untouched. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, there's plenty of places like, you know, the middle of the Sahara.

21:48It may as well be untouched. It may as well be, but it's also, I mean, there's life there. But in that life is, you know, it's flourishing. I mean, is it flourishing or is it kind of struggling? It's there. But it made me think of places like the Trinity site where the United States did its first atomic testing. That's open to the public once a year. Otherwise, nature there gets to have its own way. But, you know, the amount of nature things that can be done in the desert where the sand's been turned to glass, trinitite is limited. There are places, too, where humans are excluded, like Sentinel Island off the coast of India.

22:35Absolutely. Well, not all humans. Not all humans, just the Sentinelese. they are a culture, a tribe of people who live on this island and have made very limited contact with the outside world. I think that they were given some coconuts maybe in the 80s or 90s by some visitors, but we don't know their language. And to what extent they are aware of the outside world is unknown. What do they think about the airplanes they see way up in the sky? How big do they think the world is? These are things that we don't try to answer because it's been decided that they should be allowed to live their way without interference.

23:18They also, a couple of times, they have killed intruders, right? So people have gone there. There was a fisherman. There was a missionary who ended up, the tribe were like, no, thank you very much. Done. So yeah, the Indian government patrols it. It's really careful about making sure that nobody goes there. They are. Yeah, that missionary, that was a pretty recent story. He thought, you know, bringing the word of God to these people is my mission. And he didn't come back. His body was buried and they did try to maybe recover it, but they want to leave the Sentinelese to themselves, to be themselves.

23:53And there was a YouTuber who tried to go there. Have you seen this story? No. This was very recent. a YouTuber tried to sneak onto Sentinel Island to make contact with these essentially uncontacted people. And it was very, very controversial. He got arrested and finally posted his videos just a few weeks ago. And to be honest, it's not entirely clear to me that he actually went to Sentinel Island. The videos are, it's very, they're very unprofessional and un, un, um, serious. It's kind of like, Oh guys, I'm doing this for you. Whoa, do it for the vine. And then it's not obvious to me that he's actually there.

24:47He just kind of appears at an island, his boats on the coast and he's like a few feet away from it. And he's like, I'm here. Okay. I don't see anything. I'm going to go back. And then on his way back, he throws a can of diet coke into the water and says it'll get washed up there. I wonder what they'll think this is. I wasn't convinced he actually did it. I'm wondering how much of this was a hoax. Anyway, I'm heartened to see how controversial that whole stunt was. Me too. You don't get to make decisions for humanity on your own. Okay. No, don't do that. That's right. But there you go. Anyway, I've been to two of them, two exclusion zones.

25:25I'd really love to go to Trinity, to the Trinity site. Yeah, my uncle has been at least once. I think he tries to go like every year. Is that safe? Well, yeah, I think for the brief time that you're there, it's, I guess, safe enough. Imagine if he had a necklace made of Trinity glass. Did you show that in a field notes in the past? No, I've told you privately about how. You told me privately about it. You showed the glass that was made with lightning. I'm saving it until it's ready. But one day, one day I will have something like that for you. You've shown us two kinds of natural glass. You've shown us the glass made by lightning strikes and you've also shown us obsidian.

26:07Look, these are my private obsessions, Michael. Did you know that I gave my wife a giant chunk of obsidian for her birthday this year because of you in that episode? Yeah. I always skipped by the obsidian. My wife loves rocks as well. You guys should talk soon. But I always skip past obsidian because I didn't know what it was. I actually, I didn't even look into it. I'm afraid to admit that I was a bit incurious, which I hate. But then you taught me so much about it that I'm like, whoa. So I got her this beautiful piece. And then we had to travel with it back from New Zealand. And she was like, don't get me heavy rocks for my birthday when we've got bags to pack for an airplane.

26:47Look, that's fair. That's absolutely fair. Did you get the one with the little dying florets in it no i didn't i went with no florets forming yet they had a piece like that and i was like oh i don't know i i went with just the pure jet black piece of nice fresh geologically fresh piece and i told her hey it's going to become a new gift just give it 100 million years or more and it's the gift that keeps on giving absolutely yeah too right too right look i just i just think the stones that everyone gets excited about are really boring. I think things like volcanic glass is much more exciting. All right, thus ends my little foray into no-go zones.

27:28We're going to go to a go-go zone after the break, which is going to be your questions. How was that for a link? It's a lovely link. We'll see you guys soon.

27:56okay we're back michael first one for you what is the most cosmic horror science fact that you know cosmic horror i love this question this one came from our subreddit r slash the rest is science it It was asked by Petros Anastasia Dis. I believe that's how you pronounce it. They asked, yeah, what is the most cosmic horror science fact I know? I guess the most scared I've been by a scientific thing was probably, I was reading Greg Egan's Diaspora. And in that story, there's a robot, like an android thing that lives on the moon by itself. And its job is to like check readings from different astronomical objects.

28:46And one of them are these black holes that are going to be colliding. And the readings aren't matching the theory. They realize that actually this is going to cause a very different effect than they predicted. and it's going to create a gamma ray burst that will destroy Earth. And I was like, what don't we know about the universe that could just happen? You know, like we all feel kind of safe, like, oh, there's nothing too dangerous, very close by. Gamma ray bursts don't happen that often. But we don't know every possible gamma ray burst source near us and when it will go. And if it goes, that could just be the end.

29:26It came over and it would just happen and we would be fried. Some of us might be able to live for a few agonizing days afterwards. But this is a phenomenon where an enormous amount of gamma rays, which is the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation, just gets shot into space. And it was going to cause immense damage. I mean, talking of nuclear bombs, that's essentially like a giant, giant, giant nuke going off. Giant, giant, giant. It is the brightest thing in the universe, right? It's getting hit like directly with a pulsar's pulse. It's bad. And I started to think, man, that could happen in my lifetime.

30:17I mean, is that horror enough? That's kind of just more like... I mean, it doesn't get much worse than that. It doesn't get much worse. The thing is, is that, okay, I mean, you wouldn't see it coming because it travels at the speed light. So it's with you before you know. It would almost certainly kill everybody instantly, wouldn't it? Yeah. I mean, it all depends on the strength of the burst. But yeah, I think that's where the horror comes in, that it's not just violent. It sneaks up on you. You don't know it's coming. And once it's there, you don't know it happened because you're already gone.