Disaster Detritus
There are vast floating islands of plastic detritus to be found in the great oceans of the world. Discards, junk, garbage that has made its way from land-based cities where people endlessly consume products and carelessly dispose of the wrappings, containers, broken discarded objects, and they somehow make their way out to sea where passing ships make note of the stigmata of waste.In huge, lonely areas of ocean where there may be nothing to see but sky and the occasional seabird, this floating collection of waste products, testament to unbridled human consumption of all manner of resources, exists as a huge blemish on the conscience of the world. Unseen, it bothers few of us. Reported, it becomes a nagging self-doubt.
But it is not only the product of human waste that ends up clogging the ocean bottoms and floating along on the waves, to finally wash up on shores distant to where the discards took their land leave. Sometimes it is the result of environmental, and natural calamities that have wreaked incalculable harm resulting in the chaos of human dwellings and machinery washing far out to sea, carried there by giant waves.
The immense tsunami that hit Fukushima Province in Japan after its monumental earthquake on March 11, for example, was said to have generated 4 to 20 million tons of water-borne debris. Some of which finally settled on the vast ocean bottom, and some of which simply bobbed away on ocean currents.
That estimate of up to roughly 20 million tons of debris is mind-boggling. That would be boats, that would be buildings, that would be vehicles, farm equipment, household furniture and appliances, and everything in between, from children's toys to the children themselves.
Researchers based in Hawaii developed computer models for the purpose of forecasting the movement of the debris to enable them to predict when and where those floating oddities of debris would be washed ashore. The computer models seem to have miscalculated. A Russian vessel travelling to the Russian Far East from Hawaii ran into tsunami debris in the northwestern Pacific.
"The first populated area to be affected by the debris is Midway Atoll. We expect this winter the first pieces of tsunami debris will arrive there", said a representative of the International Cacific Research Center at the University of Hawaii, mapping the projected debris field.
"...We picked up on board the Japanese fishing boat. Radioactivity level normal, we've measured it with the Geiger", the Russian ship's first mate Natalia Borodina wrote, logging the debris. "At the approaches to the mentioned position we also sighted a TV set, fridge and a couple of other home appliances."
Labels: Japan, Natural Disasters, Russia, United States
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, October 26, 2011
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