Scientists set up cameras in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone expecting ghosts of the past—but captured something entirely different. Wildlife supposedly missing from the region for a century has returned, and the footage is reshaping what experts believed about the disaster’s aftermath.
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a 2,600-square-kilometer area of Ukraine and Belarus, was not created as a nature reserve. It came into existence after the reactor explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in April 1986 forced the evacuation of about sixty thousand people. The disaster killed two plant workers directly and caused the deaths of twenty-eight emergency responders within weeks from…