Word: lichens
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Radioactive Skimmings. University of Alaska Zoologist William O. Pruitt, an authority on caribou, gave the beasts a thorough going over and found that their flesh contained an unusual amount of caesium 137. After that, the story unfolded with dangerous logic. The caribou's winter food is largely lichens, a primitive plant that has no roots but gets its moisture and nutrients entirely from the air. Its spongy tissues soak up the scant Arctic rain like blotting paper and retain a large part of it. The fallout that is carried down by the rain is retained too. Instead of mixing...
...Soviet tests spinning around the earth, fallout was on almost everybody's mind. U.S. housewives worried that their milk might be contaminated by the tests or that their children might get cancer. The Finns worried that their reindeer meat might become radioactive when reindeers munched on contaminated lichen. Great Britain set up plans for rationing baby foods and dried milk if radioactivity became too high. And in India, some people stopped buying chicken and other fowl because they feared radiation poisoning...
...topography still resembles that of a shallow sea bottom, raised at the edges by a saucer-rim of mountains, with few barriers against wind or sun. The flat landscape is banded by four distinct regions-the icy northern shelf of the tundra, where nothing grows except moss, lichen and dwarf shrub; the dense forest zone, or the taiga, where arctic birches sprout beside palm trees; the steppe, a black earth meadowland which, when properly farmed, is among the most productive soils in the world; and farthest south, the deserts. In this overwhelming setting, Russia made its way much...