Boston Globe: The Big Picture: Wild Chernobyl.

“What happens to the environment when humans disappear? Thirty years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Reuters photographer Vasily Fedosenko documented booming populations of wolf, elk and other wildlife in the vast contaminated zone in Belarus and Ukraine. On April 26, 1986, a botched test at the nuclear plant in Ukraine, then a Soviet republic, sent clouds of smouldering radioactive material across large swathes of Europe. Over 100,000 people had to abandon the area permanently, leaving native animals the sole occupants of a cross-border “exclusion zone“ roughly the size of Luxembourg.”

(I thought the English word for Elch was moose, but it turns out that it’s the American species. The European species is called elk.)