[...] There was, says Professor Nalini Nadkarni, an ecologist at The Evergreen State College in Washington state, "a tremendous spike of carbon-14 -- actually 100 percent more carbon-14 coming into the atmosphere than what we'd had previous to those [atom bomb] tests."

Leaving The Neighborhood

Those clouds of carbon-14 atoms didn't stay at the bomb sites. "This cloud of carbon-14 went 'round and 'round and 'round the Earth and was persistent for quite a while," Nadkarni says.

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It turns out that virtually every tree that was alive starting in 1954 has a "spike" -- an atomic bomb souvenir. Everywhere botanists have looked, "you can find studies in Thailand, studies in Mexico, studies in Brazil where when you measure for carbon-14, you see it there," Nadkarni says. All trees carry this "marker" -- northern trees, tropical trees, rainforest trees -- it is a world-wide phenomenon."

<snip>

Bottom Line: Those Atomic Bombs 50 Years Ago?

The amazing lesson of all this is that a bunch of atomic bomb blasts from 50 years ago changed the biology of the world, searing themselves into most living things, and the evidence is still there. If you were born around 1954 or shortly thereafter, those bombs made their mark -- in you!

Heh, thanks a bunch.
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