Although it is not easy to define comparative criteria to qualify the ten most polluted places on our planet, an investigation by The Mother Nature Network, supported by statistical data and real atmospheric conditions, has allowed the winners of this disastrous distinction to be listed.
Currently world demography is flirting with a figure that a few decades ago would have seemed like a far-fetched projection: seven billion inhabitants. Among other consequences, this population growth has unfortunately caused fewer and fewer spaces that are kept safe from human presence and their polluting habits. However, there are spaces that stand out for their unrealistic levels of contamination. What are these places?
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1) Lake Karachay, Russia
Qualified as the most polluted place on the planet, this lake receives the waste from a nuclear weapons production plant that releases 120 million curies of radioactivity. The radiation in this place is could kill someone in just one hour of being exposed. Most worrisome, however, is that the radiation gradually seeps underground, permeating underground currents that spread toxicity.
2) Lymphen
Linfen is considered the most polluted city on the planet. Situated in China’s coal-processing industrial corridor, pollution from industrial emissions and millions of cars permeates the landscape with an apocalyptic tinge. Some say that spending a day outdoors in this city is equivalent to smoking fifty cigarettes. And it is famous that you cannot hang your clothes to dry in open spaces since they will be dirtier than before they were put in the washing machine.
3) Garbage Island
Located in the Pacific Ocean, near Hawaii, this place also known as the «garbage vortex”, occupies an area of 692,000 km/2, thus exceeding the size of countries like France or Spain. This island emerges as a massive monument to the filth of the human being, and it is due to the fact that millions of plastic and garbage remains are concentrated in the same area due to a circular movement of the equatorial currents that rotates in the clockwise direction. .
4) The Citrarum River, Indonesia
Located in West Java, this river is known as the dirtiest and most polluted in the world. More than five million people live in the surrounding area and painfully depend on its waters to survive.
5) Dzerzhinsk, Russia
The Guinness Book of Records recognized Dzerzhinsk as the city with the most chemical pollution in the world. In 2003, its mortality rate exceeded the birth rate by 260%. Between 1930 and 1998, more than 300,000 tons of chemical waste were deposited around this damned city.
6) La Oroya, in Peru
This mining town located in the Peruvian Andes owes its degrading levels of contamination to the presence of mines and lead processing plants that have been owned by American businessmen since 1922. In La Oroya, 99% of the children who live here have levels of toxicity that exceed the limits qualified as healthy.
7) Chernobyl
Unlike the rest of the most contaminated places, Chernobyl owes its merit to the high levels of radioactivity that dominate the environment thanks to the famous explosion of a nuclear plant in 1986. Once this town was home to more than fourteen thousand inhabitants and today it does not it is more than a ghost town as the living conditions are unsustainable.
8) Kabwe, Zambia
After decades of extraction and processing of cadmium and lead in the region’s mines, tons of these materials cover the hills that surround the small towns of the area. Kabwe children show between five and ten times more lead in their blood than is allowed by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The land is so polluted that no plants grow around these hills.
9) El Riachuelo, Argentina
The basin of this river that originates in the Province of Buenos Aires receives waste through numerous clandestine pipelines. The environment is made up of more than 3,500 factories that operate in its surroundings, thirteen slums, and 42 open-air garbage dumps.
10) Earth orbit
Although this place is not actually inside our planet, we could see it as an extension of it with direct repercussions, thus earning it a special mention from the Ecoosphere jury. More than two million tons of residual debris, including metallic remains of satellites, coal, and even complete «corpses» of spacecraft are found floating around the Earth, as a kind of pathetic hallmark and iconic message that we broadcast to the rest of us. of the universe.
via MNN
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