While land mines remain a lingering danger to those living in war-torn nations, new research shows that detonating them in the field could cause long-term environmental damage.
Rahel Hamad, a professor of petroleum geosciences at Soran University in Erbil, Iraq, and two colleagues studied the levels of heavy metals in the soil in a small section of northern Iraq's Halgurd-Sakran National Park, where land mines had been purposely detonated as part of clearing efforts.
The park sits in Kurdistan, on Iraq's borders with Iran and Turkey. The mines of all types and sizes that litter its landscape are remnants of the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, according to National Geographic.
The findings are detailed in a paper recently published in Environmental Science and Pollution Research. Hamad had previously studied the area to determine the effects of mine explosions on forest coverage.
This time, Hamad and his team collected soil samples from several sites and sent them to a lab to be tested for heavy metals. The results showed extremely high levels of heavy metals known to be harmful to both humans and the environment, including nickel, chromium, cobalt, arsenic and copper.
"The effects of land mines not only have impacts on humans but also on the soils, physically and chemically, through fragmentation of mines and spreading of their toxic materials such as lead, cadmium and nickel into soils following detonations," according to the paper.
"Mines cause land degradation and pose a major risk to growth as well as the fear they induce in people."
In an interview with Earther, Hamad said you can clearly see the color changes in soil around detonated mines, long after the demining is over.
Hamad said that while the loss of life and limbs to humans is the biggest concern with land mines, it's also important to consider the environmental impact on plants, animals, the food chain and conservation.
"The largest significance of the study is to help the decision-makers conserve the national park," Hamad told Earther, adding that the research could also help produce risk maps for areas contaminated in mine-clearing operations.
Landminefree.org estimates there are more than 110 million mines in the ground worldwide, and that some 5,000 people - many of them children - are killed or maimed by mines every year.
By Jan Wesner Childs
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