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| 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.
