Environment

Nuclear Legacy

Radioactive carbon from nuclear bombs detonated in the atmosphere during the 1950s and 1960s has reached the deepest corners of the world’s oceans, where scientists say the creatures living at those depths are eating it.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Guangzhou found that carbon-14 has entered the food chain at the bottom of the Mariana, Mussau and New Britain trenches in the western tropical Pacific.

The isotope was carried there by marine life near the surface that had consumed it, died and fallen to the deepest ocean floors.

“Although the oceanic circulation takes hundreds of years to bring water containing bomb [carbon] to the deepest trench, the food chain achieves this much faster,” said lead researcher and geochemist Ning Wang.