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Place

Ramsar, Iran

A view of a coastal town with buildings and a road leading towards the sea, set against a backdrop of mountains under a cloudy sky.

A coastal town on the Caspian Sea where natural background radiation is among the highest measured anywhere, in places exceeding 200 millisieverts per year — more than ten times the global average. The cause is radium-rich hot springs that have deposited radioactive scale across the surrounding geology for millennia. Long-running epidemiological studies of the resident population have not detected the elevated cancer rates standard dose-response models predict.

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