Inside Chernobyl lies an object that is so dangerous that it will "kill you in two days" if you look at it for just five minutes.
Back in April 1986, the world’s worst nuclear disaster unfolded when a reactor at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine exploded.
Radioactive material spewed from the site for 10 days, with more than 50 tons of it carried across Europe.
The blast killed two workers at the plant, while another 28 people succumbed to acute radiation syndrome in the weeks that followed.
Thousands more are thought to have died as an indirect result, with some 5,000 cases of thyroid cancer linked to the disaster in the years since.
Eight months after the disaster, investigators braved the shattered reactor and discovered something frightening in the basement: a black, lava-like mass that had burned through the structure before solidifying.
The eerie formation, called the “Elephant’s Foot” for its wrinkled shape and dark colour, is made of sand, melted concrete, and uranium. Known as corium, it is considered the most dangerous material on Earth, having only formed naturally five times in history.
When first measured, the Elephant’s Foot released nearly 10,000 roentgens of radiation per hour, per All That's Interesting. For comparison, just 50 to 100 roentgens can cause radiation sickness.
Science magazine Nautilus reported that 30 seconds of exposure to the mass would cause dizziness and fatigue, while two minutes would lead to cells haemorrhaging. Four minutes in its presence could trigger vomiting, diarrhoea, and fever. Five minutes nearby would kill a person within two days.
Standing about two metres across, the Elephant’s Foot was so radioactive in the late 1980s that pictures of it could only be taken a decade later.
“Sometimes we’d use a shovel,” radiation specialist Artur Korneyev, who investigated the site even ten years after the meltdown, said, per The New York Times. “Sometimes we’d use our boots and just kick [pieces of radioactive rubble] aside.”
He later suffered cataracts and other illnesses linked to exposure.
Despite nearly 40 years having passed, the Elephant’s Foot remains radioactive and is expected to stay so for tens of thousands of years.
Video footage resurfaced online shows “liquidators” in Hazmat suits within touching distance of the mass.
Early investigators even built a wheeled camera to study it from afar, but others were forced into deadly proximity.
Today, researchers are working to replicate corium in laboratories to study its properties without such extreme danger.
In 2020, a team at the University of Sheffield managed to create a mini version using depleted uranium, about 40 percent less radioactive than natural uranium. Still, experts stress that simulants cannot perfectly recreate the original.
“Of course, studies of simulant materials are important since they are way easier and allow lots of experiments,” said Andrei Shiryaev of the Frumkin Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Russia.
Almost four decades on, both the Elephant’s Foot and the relics of Chernobyl remain haunting reminders of how close humanity came to nuclear catastrophe.