Tsunami Debris Highlights Ocean Garbage Problems

James Keller, The Canadian Press
Published Wednesday, Aug. 8, 2012 6:43PM PDT
Last Updated Wednesday, Aug. 8, 2012 6:48PM PDT 

A paying passenger (bottom) on an ocean garbage patch research cruise.

Photograph courtesy Stiv Wilson, 5gyres.org

 

RICHMOND, B.C. -- A U.S.-based environmental group is using the ongoing focus about what to do with the floating wreckage from last year's Japanese tsunami to highlight the much larger issue of debris in the world's oceans.

The Ocean Voyages Institute recently completed a trip off the North American coast as it sailed from San Francisco to British Columbia, where it is scheduled to attend a maritime festival in Richmond, south of Vancouver, this weekend.

The group's ship, a 46-metre, twin-masted sailing vessel named the Kaisei, encountered debris from the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami roughly 500 kilometres off the coast of Oregon and Washington state, said Mary Crowley, who founded the Ocean Voyages Institute.

Crowley, who wasn't on the ship for the most recent voyage, said the Kaisei found part of a dock and other smaller debris that experts on board believed were swept into the ocean by the tsunami.

She said the tsunami debris poses a significant risk to the Pacific Ocean and the animals that inhabit it, but she noted it pales in comparison to the vast amount of debris -- much of it floating plastic garbage -- already in the world's oceans.

"The tsunami debris adds this whole other element of knowing where it all went into the ocean and where it's going and how it's spreading, but in fact every day, all over the Pacific basin, debris is going into the ocean," Crowley told reporters Wednesday.

"So the tsunami debris shows us graphically what's happening."

Specifically, she pointed to a massive field of floating plastic often referred to as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," which is believed to make up an area roughly the size of Texas.  
[ Pacific-TV note: It was the size of Texas, but after the tsunami it's estimated to be the size of the continental U.S. ]

The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" is located between Hawaii and California in the northern Pacific Ocean, where millions of small bits of plastic have gathered in a vortex of ocean currents known as a gyre. Some of the debris from the tsunami is expected to join the garbage patch.


READ MORE : http://bc.ctvnews.ca/tsunami-debris-highlights-ocean-garbage-problem-group-1.908246#ixzz25T4Cul9O

Pacific Garbage Patch a bigger worry than tsunami debris

Credit: Mario Aguilera / Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Debris from the Japanese tsunami is starting to wash ashore on the U.S. West Coast in a big way.

Beachcombers from Northern California to Alaska are finding fishing floats, soccer balls and ships that have drifted thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean after being dragged to sea by the March 2011 tsunami -- even a Harley-Davidson motorcycle that was traced back to a tsunami survivor.

Authorities this week confirmed the largest arrival yet: A 66-foot dock that floated onto a beach near Newport, Ore.

Still, marine scientists say a far bigger problem is the untold amount of everyday garbage swirling in a vast, slow-moving vortex known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. That's the popular name for the vast concentration of debris -- most of it confetti-sized flecks of discarded plastic -- circling endlessly about 1,000 miles off the California coast.

A study released last month found a 100-fold increase in plastic debris in the garbage patch over the past 40 years.

"I'm more concerned about our constant input of trash than I am about these one-time disasters," lead author Miriam Goldstein, a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, told the Los Angeles Times.

"We can’t prevent terrible events like the tsunami, but dumping plastic into the ocean is something we can control and don’t do very well," Goldstein said.

She and other researchers found the upsurge in plastic debris in the middle of the ocean is so dramatic that seafaring insects known as "sea skaters" or "water striders" now use it as a surface to lay eggs, where before they might have used natural pieces of flotsam like feathers, shells and pumice.

That is not to say debris from the tsunami is considered harmless.

A top National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official was grilled by Washington lawmakers last month about how hazardous the debris will be and how it will be cleaned up. Though none of the debris is believed to be radioactive since it was dragged to sea before the nuclear disaster, authorities are concerned about invasive organisms hitching rides on the larger objects.

Oregon State University researchers studying the floating dock that washed ashore this week discovered it was carrying a huge amount of barnacles, starfish, urchins, anemones, mussels, snails and algae from Japan.
All that biological material must be scraped off to prevent the spread of non-native and potentially harmful organisms to the United States.

Source: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/06/great-pacific-garbage-patch-tsunami-debris.html
Author: Tony Barboza
Photo: Tangled net and plastics such as these make up much of the enourmous Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Watch the Debris from Japan Tsunami Travel Across the North Pacific Gyre

Quote from: NOAAVisualizations

After the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011, tons of debris was swept into the Pacific. Much of it is buoyant enough to float on the surface and can be moved around by small scale currents and large scale circulation patterns, such as the North Pacific Gyre. The gyre, bounded by the Kuroshio Current on the west, California Current on the east, and Equatorial Current on the south tends to entrain debris in the center of the Pacific basin, creating what is commonly known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch." Though the bulk of the marine debris remains in the ocean for years in an area north of Hawaii, individual pieces are continually washing up on the continental and island shores that border the basin. NOAA's Marine Debris Program leads efforts to track and remove much of this existing trash, and is currently assessing the tsunami debris. Scientists as NOAA's Earths System Research Laboratory developed the debris dispersion model, shown here. Using five years of historical weather patterns, the model is used to approximate how debris will circulate across the basin.

ALERT - Tsunami Debris from Japan Headed Towards the Pacific Garbage Patch!

 

Quote from comlike4:

 The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is expanding. For those who do not know what this is, it is basically comprised of two floating landfills one between Hawaii and California, and the other between Hawaii and Japan. These patches have been growing exponentially, from the first few pieces of fishing nets and plastic bottles discovered 30 years ago, to two patches at least twice the size of Texas (that's a total of over one million square miles of junk). These patches are made up of plastic bottles, furniture, home appliances--pretty much anything you can think of, though 90% of the trash is plastic.

Quote from mallugirls15:

The Fukushima power plant meltdown isn't the only environmental problem created by the Japan tsunami. Refrigerators, TVs, rooftops and other items that the tsunami swept away last year are now floating in the Pacific Ocean, the Washington Post reported. Officials expect the debris to get caught in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The tsunami, which killed 15,844 people and left over 3,000 missing, also washed out 8 million tons of debris to the sea. Most of the debris sank near the shore, the Los Angeles Times reported. But the debris that didn't sink has since traveled 3,000 miles away.