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Comment by patfla | Hacker News Reader

It seems that's the same bay as for Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, which with a population of 180,000 is Kamchatska's largest city. So this is very close to what amounts to a large population for Kamchatka.

The Russians have always been cavalier about pollution and, as much as it may be hard to believe for some Americans, even more cavalier than here in the US. Not the Russian people of course but their political systems whether Communist or post-Communist. Corruption, lack of accountability and so on. Then obviously Siberia is very large and very sparsely population and interested parties might think: big mess? No big deal.

Sort of like the intermontane west generally in the US. Wasteland, right?

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> Sort of like the intermontane west generally in the US. Wasteland, right?

Well the western US is generally considered to be a delicate arid ecosystems that is really easy to mess up permanently. A lot of it was really messed up from timber cutting, mining, and cattle ranching in the 1800's.

And it only looks like it's recovered because no one remembers what it was like before. There is a valley where the Mormons found a rich verdant prairie. And of course they plowed it under and grew the best crop of wheat they ever saw. And the next winter the winds blew the topsoil away.

The native prairie biome has pretty much been completely eradicated in the US. Pretty impressive for what once dominated the land from Wisconsin to Montana

As a non American, how did it look like?

Timber cutting also destroyed the majority of old growth trees, causing high densities of smaller and younger trees to grow in their place. Today we often think of forests being healthy when we see dense uninterrupted lush green trees. However forests in the western US were sparser previously, with regular wildfires thinning younger trees, sparing older/tougher trees, modulating forest density, and altering the mix of undergrowth/young trees/old growth. There are videos on YouTube showing comparisons of forests from 100 years ago and today, and they look very different as a result of these changes.

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