Philly.com:

They all left in the wake of a very different sound nearly 30 years earlier: the explosion of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986, which left dozens dead and drove more than 100,000 people from their homes across a 1,600-square-mile swath of Ukraine and Belarus. These days, abandoned apartment complexes are nothing more than crumbled concrete wrecks. Vines crawl up the decaying walls of old farmhouses and break unintended skylights into their roofs. No one lives in the postapocalyptic setting.

No one human, that is. Wildlife populations there – shaggy-haired wild boar, long-legged elk, the howling choruses of wolves that so captivated Hinton last August – are flourishing.

That’s according to a study published last week in the journal Current Biology, which found that mammal numbers in the exclusion zone are as high, if not higher, than in even the most protected parks in Belarus.

Haunting and just a bit hopeful.