NEARLY 30 YEARS ON, CHERNOBYL has been swallowed back up by nature. Now, it appears the same is happening to the exclusion zone around Fukushima Daiichi, the site of the world’s second-worst nuclear disaster.
Four years after the accident, Polish photographer Arkadiusz Podniesinski visited the exclusion zone at Fukushima.
He found that the area has huge dump sites for bags like these, which are all full of irradiated soil.
But in the midst of the destruction and decay, Podniesinski discovered mother nature has returned to the condemned zone in force.
Photographer Andrea Bonisol Aquati also captured the eerily beautiful phenomenon in the nearby ghost town of Namie.
While the events at the Fukushima Daiichi plant after the earthquake and tsunami were a catastrophe, there’s a strange comfort to seeing how quickly nature can bounce back and take over places that have been destroyed by mankind’s greatest mistakes.
For more pictures of Chernobyl and Fukushima, check out Arkadiusz Podniesinski’s website here. For more from Andrea Bonisol Alquati, check out his website here. h/t: Bored Panda.