April 12, 2016 at 04:53PM

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. -- By Reuters

A tawny owl leaves a chimney in the 30 km (19 miles) exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the abandoned village of Kazhushki, Belarus, March 16. (Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters)


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