Due to the positive response to our series of ‘Lost Papers’, which we started in the second issue of volume 47, 2011, we are pleased to continue this project.
In this issue, we are going on with the publication of papers from the ZfI-Mitteilungen, an institutional journal of the former Central Institute for Isotope and Radiation Research, Leipzig. The topic here – as announced in issue 2 – is dealing with isotope studies performed during Antarctic expeditions between 1976 and the end of the 1980s. The results were published originally in the ZfI-Mitteilungen No 51 and 143.
However, before we release the results of Antarctic research projects, an article of high relevance for the present situation in Fukushima (Japan), the location of the nuclear catastrophe in March 2011, is to be published in this series of ‘Lost Papers’. After the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in April 1986, D. Weiss, scientist at the former GDR institution National Board for Atomic Safety and Radiation Protection in Berlin, had summarised studies of the distribution of radioactive nuclides (134Cs, 137Cs, 90Sr and others) in water from the Baltic Sea before and after the Chernobyl nuclear accident. The data will be helpful for comparative studies of the distribution of radioactive nuclides in different environmental compartments. We hope that the article will meet the interest of scientists dealing with natural and man-made radioactivity in the environment for the last 30 years.
Three papers are applied to isotope research in the Antarctic environment.
The article by G. Strauch et al. presented the first overview of isotope variations of hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen in algae, lichens and mosses collected in an Antarctic oasis, the Schirmacher oasis. These data may be interesting for ecological studies in extreme and arid environments.
The two papers by D. Hebert and one of them together with K. Fröhlich presented first results of the tritium concentration at the Russian Antarctic inland research station Vostok, and along snow and ice traverses from the Antarctic coast to the inland ice cap. They derived an altitude effect for tritium. Moreover, 14C measurements were performed from CO2, plants, and guano deposits in the sector of the Russian Antarctic station Molodezhnaya.
In the next issue further isotopes studies will be presented dealing with human metabolism under the stress of living conditions during an Antarctic wintering expedition, and with hydrological lake studies.