Still Hot

"What are they worrying about?" asked Editor Thomas Dabney of the Socorro, N.Mex. Chieftain. "All the critters came back to the crater, and they're just as ornery as they ever were."

Last week, on the fourth anniversary of the explosion of the first atomic bomb, reporters were being shown around the crater at "Trinity," birthplace of the Atomic Age. The crater, still surrounded by a high wire fence, is still radioactive. A man lying down in it for only a few hours would get all the radiation he could safely absorb in a week.

Green Scum & Twisted Steel. Since the crater was first shown to outsiders (TIME, Sept. 17, 1945), its appearance has become less dramatic. There are no longer any lead-shielded, white-painted Sherman tanks lumbering about the crater. The great sheet of crackly "trinitite" (glassy melted soil) that looked like a scummy green lake has largely disintegrated; only a faint green ghost of it remains among the returning vegetation. Occasionally, fragments glitter in the sun. The crater is still a shallow, rimless saucer pressed down into the earth by the force of the explosion. In it may be seen a few twisted bits of metal and the reinforced concrete foundations of the tall steel tower that the bomb blew away as vapor.

For the last two summers Drs. Albert W. Bellamy and Kermit Larson, of the University of California at Los Angeles, have been working with a party of twelve helpers in the region around Trinity. To calm local worries, they pretended that they were studying local plants and animals. Actually, they were estimating the biological effects of the atomic explosion. They collected over 600 different kinds of plants. They trapped a variety of animals and examined them for radioactivity and possible organic changes. They measured the radioactivity of the soil over a wide region.

Tumbleweed & Antelope. Most of their findings were negative. Both plants and animals have come back with a rush to the atom-blasted area. The crater itself is thick with tumbleweeds and lively grasshoppers. There are rattlesnakes, lizards, pack rats and mice in the vicinity--none of them, apparently, the worse for their hot habitat. A cottontail rabbit has a home in the crater itself. The antelope (which local stories said had been frightened into Mexico) are back in the great arid valley.

But Drs. Bellamy and Larson are still cautious. Radioactive dust, they say, was blown high in the air by the explosion. Carried by the wind, it settled back to earth in a northeasterly area ten miles wide and 100 miles long. In parts of this area, the soil is detectably radioactive as far as six inches down, and the depth of penetration is slowly increasing.

Are conditions in this region and in the crater still dangerous to man? Says Dr Bellamy: "No man knows. No firm answer can be given." The radioactivity in the crater itself, he thinks, may last two or three hundred years.

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