Rather unfortunately, it has also led to some wild speculation on the widespread dangers of Fukushima radiation on the internet. Posts with titles like “Holy Fukushima – Radiation From Japan Is Already Killing North Americans” and “28 Signs That The West Coast Is Being Absolutely Fried With Nuclear Radiation From Fukushima” (which Southern Fried Science has already throughly debunked ) keep popping up on my facebook feed from well-meaning friends.

I’m here to tell you that these posts are just plain garbage. While there are terrible things that happened around the Fukushima Power Plant in Japan; Alaska, Hawaii and the West Coast aren’t in any danger.  These posts were meant to scare people (and possibly written by terrified authors). They did just that, but there is a severe lack of facts in these posts. Which is why I am here to give you the facts, and nothing but the facts.

WHAT WAS RELEASED INTO THE OCEAN AT FUKUSHIMA?

The radioactive rods in the Fukushima power plant are usually cooled by seawater [CORRECTION: they are usually cooled by freshwater. As a last ditch emergency effort at Fukushima seawater was used as a coolant.]. The double whammy of an earthquake and a tsunami pretty much released a s**tstorm of badness: the power went out, meltdown started and eventually the radioactive cooling seawater started leaking (and was also intentionally released) into the ocean. Radioactive isotopes were also released into the air and were absorbed by the ocean when they rained down upon it. These two pathways introduced mostly Iodine-131, Cesium-137, and Cesium-134, but also a sprinkling of Tellurium, Uranium and Strontium to the area surrounding the power plant.

There aren’t great estimates of how much of each of these isotopes were released into the ocean since TEPCO, the company that owns the power plant hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with information, but the current estimates are around 538,100 terabecquerels (TBq) which is above Three-Mile Island levels, but below Chernobyl levels. And as it turns out, they recently found contaminated groundwater has also started leaking into the sea. TEPCO, the gift that keeps on giving.

WHAT’S A BEQUEREL? WHAT’S A SIEVERT?

Units of Radiation are confusing. When you start reading the news/literature/blogs, there are what seems like a billion different units to explain radiation. But fear not, I’ve listed them below and what they mean (SI units first).

Becquerel[Bq] or Curie[Ci]: radiation emitted from a radioactive material  (1 Ci = 3.7 × 10¹⁰ Bq)

Gray [Gy] or Rad[rad]: radiation absorbed by another material (1Gy = 100 rad)

Sieverts[Sv]* or “roentgen equivalent in man”[rem]: how badly radiation will damage biological tissue (1 Sv = 100 rem)

You can convert from Grays and Rads to Rem and Sieverts, but you have to know what kind of radiation it is. For example alpha radiation from naturally occurring Polonium-210 is more damaging to biological tissues than gamma radiation from Cesium-137. Even if you absorbed the same number of Grays from Cesium or Polonium, you would still effectively receive more damaging radiation from Polonium because the number of Sieverts is higher for Polonium than Cesium. And kids, Sieverts and Seavers  are both dangerous to your health but please don’t confuse them.

WHAT’S CESIUM-137?

Cesium-137 is product of nuclear fission. Before us humans, there was no Cesium-137 on earth. But then we started blowing stuff up with nuclear bombs and VOILA!, there are now detectable, but safe, levels of Cesium-137 in all the world oceans.

WHAT DO THE MAPS OF FUKUSHIMA RADIATION IN THE PACIFIC REALLY TELL US?

There are a bunch of maps being thrown around on the internet as evidence that we are all going to die from Fukushima radiation. I’m going to dissect them here. Apologies in advance for dose of snark in this section because some of these claims are just god awful. Spoiler: radiation probably has reached the West Coast but it’s not dangerous.

MAP OF TERROR #1: The Rays of Radioactive Death!

MAP OF TERROR #2: EHRMAGHAD radioactive SPAGHATTA NADLES attack Hawaii!

I mean I guess this is a bit better. At least this map used an ocean model that actually predicts where radioactive particles will be pushed around by surface ocean currents. But it still gets a BIG FAT FAIL. The engineering company that put this image/piece of crap out there couldn’t even be bothered to put a legend on the map. Their disclaimer says “THIS IS NOT A REPRESENTATION OF THE RADIOACTIVE PLUME CONCENTRATION.” Then what do the colors mean?

MAP OF TERROR #3: THE BLOB! 

It’s true, oceanographic models have shown that radiation from Fukushima has probably already hit Aleutians and Hawaiian Island chain, and should reach the California Coast by Fall 2014 [Behrens et al. 2012]. The map above is showing the spread of Cesium-137 from the Fukushima reactor would look like right now, I mean radiation is apparently EVERYWHERE! But what is missing from most of the discussion of these maps is what  the colors ACTUALLY mean.

We shall now seek guidance from the little box in the upper right hand corner of the map called the legend**.  The colors show how much less radioactive the the decrease in the radioactive concentrations of Cesium-137 isotopes have become since being emitted from Fukushima. For example, the red areas indicate the Fukushima Cesium-137 is now more than 10,000 times less radioactive concentrated than when released. The California Coast, more than a million times less. The punchline is that overall concentrations of radioactive isotopes and therefore radioactivity in the Pacific will increase from Pre-Fukushima levels, but it will be way less than what was seen in coastal Japan and definitely not enough to be harmful elsewhere (we’ll get to more of that later).

** As Eve Rickert has thoughtfully pointed out, my description of the image is a little confusing. I’ve added corrections in blue to clarify.

HOW MUCH RADIATION WILL REACH THE WEST COAST?

Practically, what does ten thousand or a million times less radiation mean? It means that these models estimate the West Coast and the Aleutians will see radiation levels anywhere from 1-20 Bq/m³,while Hawaiian Islands could see up to 30 Bq/m³ [Behrens et al. 2012, Nakano et al. 2012,  Rossi et al. 2013 ].

I could write a small novel explaining why the numbers differ between the models. For those that love the details, here’s a laundry list of those differences: the amount of radiation initially injected into the ocean, the length of time it took to inject the radiation (slowly seeping or one big dump), the physics embedded in the model, the background ocean state, the number of 20-count shrimp per square mile (Just kidding!), atmospheric forcing, inter-annual and multi-decadal variability and even whether atmospheric deposition was incorporated into the model.

Like I said before, the West Coast will probably not see more than 20 Bq/m³ of radiation. Compare these values to the map of background radiation of Cesium-137 in the ocean before Fukushima (from 1990), it’s only 4 Bq/m³ in the Pacific. Radiation will increase in the Pacific, but it’s at most 10 times higher than previous levels, not thousands. Although looking at this map I would probably stop eating Baltic Herring fish oil pills and Black Sea Caviar (that radiation is from Chernobyl) before ending the consumption of  fish from the Pacific Ocean.

WILL THE RADIATION REACHING THE WEST COAST BE DANGEROUS?

No it will not be dangerous. Even within 300 km of Fukushima, the additional radiation that was introduced by the Cesium-137 fallout is still well below the background radiation levels from naturally occurring radioisotopes. By the time those radioactive atoms make their way to the West Coast it will be even more diluted and therefore not dangerous at all.

It’s not even dangerous to swim off the coast of Fukushima. Buessler et al. figured out how much radiation damage you would get if you doggie paddled about Fukushima (Yes, science has given us radioactive models of human swimmers). It was less than 0.03% of the daily radiation an average Japanese resident receives. Tiny! Hell, the radiation was so small even immediately after the accident scientists did not wear any special equipment to handle the seawater samples (but they did wear detectors just in case). If you want danger, you’re better off licking the dial on an old-school glow in the dark watch.

CAN I EAT FISH FROM THE PACIFIC?

For the most part the answer is YES. Some fisheries in Japan are still closed because of radioactive contamination. Bottom fish are especially prone to contamination because the fallout collects on the seafloor where they live. Contaminated fish shouldn’t be making it to your grocery store, but I can’t guarantee that so if you are worried just eat fish from somewhere other than Japan.

Fish from the rest of the Pacific are safe. To say it mildly, most fish are kinda lazy. They really don’t travel that far so when you catch a Mahi Mahi off the coast of Hawaii its only going to be as contaminated as the water there, which isn’t very much.Hyperactive fish, such as tuna may be more radioactive than local lazy fish because they migrate so far. As Miriam pointed out in this post, there is a detectable increase of radiation in tuna because they were at one point closer to Fukushima, but the levels are not hazardous.

To alleviate fears that you may be glowing due to ingestion too many visits to your local sushi joint, Fischer et al. figured out exactly how much damaging radiation you would receive from eating a tower of tuna rolls. Seriously. Science is just that awesome. Supermarket tuna hunters would receive 0.9 μSv of radiation, while the outdoors subsistence tuna hunter would receive 4.7 μSv. These values are about the same or a little less than the amount a person receives from natural sources.

To put 0.9 μSv of radiation in perspective check out this awesome graph of radiation by xkcd. You’ll get the same amount of radiation by eating 9 bananas. Monkeys might be doomed, but you are not.

I EAT PACIFIC FISH AND SO CAN YOU!

I hope this list of facts has answered most of your questions and convinced you the Pacific and its inhabitants will not be fried by radiation from Fukushima. I certainly feel safe eating sustainable seafood from the Pacific and so should you. If you are still unsure, please feel free to ask questions in the comments section below.

UPDATE #1: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM GROUNDWATER LEAKS

There’s been a lot of discussion in the comments about the contribution from the groundwater leaks. I did some homework and here’s what I came up with. (Also thanks to everyone for the interesting discussions in the comments!)

The ground water leaks are in fact problematic, but what has been released into the ocean is MUCH less than the initial release (although I admit the groundwater itself has extremely high radiation levels).  The estimates from Jota Kanda are that 0.3 TBq per month (10¹² Bq) of contaminated groundwater is leaking into the ocean, which has added another 9.6 TBq of radiation into the sea at most.  The initial releases were about 16.2 PBq (10¹⁵ Bq), about 1500 times more radiation. With this in mind, the additional radioactivity leak from ground water isn’t a relatively large addition to the ocean.

The models by Behrens and Rossi used initial source functions of 10 PBq and 22 PBq, which is on par with the most recent estimates.  Since their models used a much higher source function, that says to me that this relatively smaller input from groundwater still won’t raise the radioactivity to dangerous levels on the West Coast, Alaska and Hawaii.  Recent observations around Hawaii by Kamenik et al. also suggest that the models may have even overestimated the amount of radiation that hit Hawaii, which is good news.

But there are caveats to this information as well. The leaking groundwater contains strontium and tritium which are more problematic than Cesium-137. But it sounds like strontium accumulates in bones and is only a problem if you eat small fish with the bones in, like sardines (and it will only affect sardines caught near Japan since they don’t travel far). I suspect there might be some precedent for understanding the dangers of tritium in seawater from the 20th century nuclear testing in atolls, but I really don’t know. There is also 95 TBq of radioactive cesium is in the sediment around Fukushima, which is still super problematic for bottom dwelling fish and therefore local Japanese Fisheries. Lastly, another source is terrestrial runoff. These numbers haven’t been quantified but they are probably minor because they contain a fraction of the total deposition from atmospheric fallout, which itself was a fraction of what was released into the ocean.

So even with the new groundwater leaks, the available evidence still tells me I can eat fish from the West Coast, Hawaii, and Alaska.

http://www.nature.com/news/ocean-still-suffering-from-fukushima-fallout-1.11823

http://www.biogeosciences.net/10/6045/2013/bg-10-6045-2013.pdf

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/11/fukushima-fallout-not-affecting-u-s-caught-fish/

UPDATE #2: ANOTHER GREAT RESOURCE FOR LEARNING ABOUT THE SCIENCE OF FUKUSHIMA RADIATION

For more in depth articles about radiation from Fukushima in the ocean you should definitely check out some of Marine Chemist’s Posts at Daily Kos. Written by Jay T. Cullen, a Marine Chemist at the University of Victoria, the posts walk you through the most current research on Fukushima Radiation from a variety of sources. I especially recommend his most recent post on Update on Fukushima Radionuclides in the North Pacific and Off the West Coast of North America, were he discusses the recent detection of Fukushima radiation off the coast of Canada. The most recent observations from June 2013 shows the spread of Cesium-137 was on par with the predictions by Rossi et al., but the concentrations are safe and lower than predicted.

[DISCLAIMER: The creators of the NOAA tsunami map work in my building. I secretly fangirl squeal when I walk past their offices. I recently had coffee with Joke F. Lübbecke, who also works in my building. It was caffeinated.]

*Confusingly, oceanographers also co-opted the acronym Sv for Sverdrups their unit for volume transport. 1 Sverdrup = 1 Sv = one million cubic metres per second = 400 Olympic swimming pools just passed your house in one second.

SOURCES:

Behrens, Erik, et al. “Model simulations on the long-term dispersal of 137Cs released into the Pacific Ocean off Fukushima.” Environmental Research Letters 7.3 (2012): 034004.

Buesseler, Ken O., et al. “Fukushima-derived radionuclides in the ocean and biota off Japan.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109.16 (2012): 5984-5988.

Fisher, Nicholas S., et al. “Evaluation of radiation doses and associated risk from the Fukushima nuclear accident to marine biota and human consumers of seafood.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2013).

Nakano, Masanao, and Pavel P. Povinec. “Long-term simulations of the 137 Cs dispersion from the Fukushima accident in the world ocean.” Journal of environmental radioactivity 111 (2012): 109-115.

Rossi, Vincent, et al. “Multi-decadal projections of surface and interior pathways of the Fukushima Cesium-137 radioactive plume.” Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers (2013).

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution FAQ: Radiation from Fukushima

Explained: rad, rem, sieverts, becquerelsl. A guide to terminology about radiation exposure

The post True facts about Ocean Radiation and the Fukushima Disaster first appeared on Deep Sea News.

A recent string of oarfish have washed ashore in California.  And by recent string I mean two.  On October 18th, a pregnant 14-foot long female was found dead on an Oceanside, California beach. On October 13th, an 18-foot dead oarfish was found a by a snorkeler and drug ashore off Catalina Island.

This, ahem, pattern is causing people to ask, “Why are so many oarfish washing ashore?” In the words of @para_sight on Twitter, “Two is not a trend.”  To put in a nerdier statistical way, like you would expect anything less from DSN, you can fit a regression line to two points and get a great fit, but it’s questionable since the degrees of freedom is ONE.  To give you an example, my dog has taken a dump in a field of wildflowers twice this year.  Should the public infer my dog only leaves fecal deposits near wildflowers?

Let’s take a step back. Regalecus glesne is the longest of the bony fishes.  The longest confirmed specimen was 36.09 feet (11 meters) in length.  A more common length is around 9.84 feet (3 meters). The Giant Oarfish is also typically a deep-sea fish found between 200-1000 meters and found in all of the major oceans.  Giant Oarfish feed on krill, small fish, and squid.  They spawn late in year and oarfish larvae can be easily found at the surface.  The Giant Oarfish was described in 1772 and the scientific name refers to “belonging to a king” and the farm at Glesvær (not far from Norway’s second largest city of Bergen) where the type specimen was found.

Undoubtedly the length, odd appearance, and their deep habitat make them of great interest to the public and scientists alike. However, oarfish washing ashore is not exactly a rare event. On September 24, 2013  a “mysterious creature”, more than likely an oarfish, washed ashore in Spain. May 13, 2010 in Sweden. February 25, 2009 in England. January of 2012 in Florida. I’m going to stop here but let’s just say I could keep going for a while. There are literally hundreds of such cases.

So while two oarfish washing ashore (say that 10 times really fast) in California within a week of one another is interesting it doesn’t demand we search for a reason.  But, the media is searching for an answer for this pattern.  And in drudging around someone hit on what has to be the worst idea.  In Japanese folklore, the oarfish is known as the Messenger from the Sea God’s Palace and appears on beaches to predict earthquakes.  Of course anytime something washes ashore in California, someone want to tie it to earthquakes.

First, I cannot seem to find any references to the original sources of this myth.  Hopefully someone in the comments below can provide a link to something other than the mass media hysteria.

Second, the evidence given for this phenomenon is the unusual numbers of oarfish that washed ashore in December 2009 to March 2010 off Japan. According to LiveScience,  “Shortly before the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami [March 11, 2011] struck Japan, about 20 oarfish stranded themselves on beaches in the area.” The evidence of the oarfish washing ashore can be found in a piece in the Telegraph before the tsunami. But only a few were actually washed ashore.  Most were caught in nets…not even close to the same thing.

“The science and study just isn’t there. There’s a big difference between suggesting something like that and proving it. What did an animal sense that maybe we didn’t that told them about a coming event?”  In other words, there is no systematic study that exists that finds a link between oarfish strandings and earthquakes. None, zip, zilch, zero, nadda. 

Fourth, what about all the sizable earthquakes and tsunamis that have occurred without any warning from our oarfish friends?  1/10 is really shit odds. Of course that is just major earthquakes.  I guess they can’t be trusted for anything less than 8.0 magnitude.  You suck oarfish.

Fifth, earthquakes happen all the time in California. Where in the hell were the oarfish in May during the 5.7 quake at Canyondam or the 4.8 quake at Isla Vista?  I mean sure they are minor quakes and I don’t expect an oarfish to kill itself on a beach for me every time but surely an oarfish has the time to tweet at me?  So basically oarfish are doing a crappy job of predicting California earthquakes. 

Sixth, as put by HJ Walker, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, “If there is a enormous giant earthquake beneath the sea, other fish would be affected – not just one or two oarfish.”

Seventh, there are better more plausible explanations.  Disease, sudden environmental changes, currents, anything is more plausible than an earthquake.  Kim, a highly trained physical oceanographer, makes a great case for abnormal currents. Giant squid strandings increased when there are rises in bottom temperature. Or as my friend, a trained ecologist (h/t to S.V.T), mentioned animals are distributed patchily across the planet.  Basically, you don’t find a species everywhere and where you do find there is usually more than one.  Where one oarfish is there are bound to be others nearby.

The post Oarfish Can Supposedly Predict Earthquakes, Apparently They Suck At It first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Objects that float mostly above the surface of the water, like chunks of styrofoam,  are more affected by the speed of the wind than the speed of the water, so they scud quickly across the ocean surface. This means they have “high windage,” and are shown by the red dots in the model. Objects that float half-in, half-out of the water, like fishing buoys and containers, have medium windage and move somewhat faster than the water (green dots). Objects that don’t float above the surface of the water, like fishing nets and plastic crates, have low windage and move the same speed the water (purple dots).

This explains why debris objects appear to be showing up earlier than scientists originally expected – high windage objects such as the dock found in Oregon and the soccer ball found in Alaska moved relatively quickly across the ocean.

Many thanks to Nick for answering my questions over Twitter, and for Nikolai & Jan for making their model publicly available. 

The post How wind-blown Japanese tsunami debris may move across the Pacific first appeared on Deep Sea News.

There’s nothing like a terrifying headline to point out how differently scientists and the public see the world. On Monday, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (PNAS) found that Pacific bluefin tuna had carried detectable radiation from the Fukushima meltdown across the Pacific, and the headline freakouts began. As NPR reporter Richard Harris* pointed out, “What snarky headline writer could resist a story about ‘hot tuna?’ Or how about ‘tuna meltdown?'”

The mere mention of radiation terrifies people – and certainly the Fukushima meltdown was scary. But there’s a big difference between DETECTABLE radiation and HAZARDOUS radiation. The ocean is absolutely filled with detectable radiation, mostly from naturally occurring compounds like potassium-40. There’s human-introduced radiation too – in fact, traces from nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960s is used to estimate when deep ocean water last “breathed” at the surface. This doesn’t mean that a watery version of Chernobyl lurks in the deep, just that radioactive materials are sometimes so rare in the world that tiny quantities can be linked to specific happenings.

The same thing is happening with the Fukushima fallout, at least in the ocean (I can’t speak to radiation on land). Fukushima did increase cesium (Cs) isotopes in waters off Japan by 10–1,000 times, but that’s because previous levels were very, very low. So this increase is DETECTABLE but not HAZARDOUS. (Have you started to notice a theme here?) Same thing for the radiation found in zooplankton and marine fishes in June 2011. From another PNAS study by Buessler et al. released this April:

Concentration factors—essentially the degree of radionuclide enrichment in biota relative to ambient water—are used to evaluate the radiological risks associated with seafood consumption and were determined by dividing the radionuclide concentration in biota by the dissolved concentration in surface water. Median values were 44 for 137 Cs and 36 for 134 Cs, comparable to the recommended International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) value of 40 for zooplankton….The median concentration of 137 Cs in micronektonic fish (secondary consumers) was less than that in zooplankton (primary and secondary consumers) and about 150-fold below the Japanese legal limit for fish of 500 Bq·kg−1 wet weight.

So teeny fish in the waters off Japan just a few months after Fukushima had such low levels of radioactivity that they are considered safe to eat under Japanese law. And of this radioactivity, only 10-30% of the total radioactivity found in marine life was attributable to the Fukushima discharges – the rest was from naturally occurring radionuclides, mostly potassium-40.

So this brings us to the new study by Madigan et al. on big fish that used to be in the waters off Japan, but went and swam over to California – the Pacific bluefin tuna. This study examined 15 juvenile bluefin that were spawned in Japan and caught off San Diego, California. Again, the researchers found a DETECTABLE increase – the bluefin tuna caught in 2011 had  total 134+137 Cs concentrations about 10 times higher than bluefin tuna caught in previous years. But was it HAZARDOUS?

The tuna contained 134 Cs at 4.0 ± 1.4 Bq per kg and 137 Cs at 6.3 ± 1.5 Bq per kg. (Here’s an explanation of the Becquerel (Bq), which is the unit of radioactivity.) In contrast, the FAO limit for both cesium radionuclides in human food (including infant food) is 1,000 Bq per kg. The United States FDA limit is 1,200 Bq per kg. Japan’s limit used to be 500 Bq per kg, but they just lowered it to 100 Bq per kg – but the tuna caught off California contains ten times LESS radiation than even the strictest food limit. What’s the theme? DETECTABLE but not HAZARDOUS. As Richard Harris put it:

Really, the result is a testament to how well scientists can now measure tiny amounts of radiation. And of course it’s a remarkable lesson in how wildlife can be traced using accidental “tags” instead of using the labor-intensive plastic ones.

If you are still worried about the cesium from Fukushima, Robert Emery at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston says you’d need to eat 2.5 to 4 tons of tuna in a year to get a dose of cesium-137 that exceeds health limits. That’s a lot of sushi.

Now, there are lots of reasons to decline to eat bluefin tuna, which I’ve written about extensively. (Also see Eric Heupel’s great comment on the cost of ranching Pacific bluefin). But really what this story shows is that bluefin are amazing fish that travel vast distances before they’re even grown up! It’s a story about cool science, and there’s no need for it to be muddied by fear.

*Full disclosure: Holly and I (along with Andrew Thaler) met Richard Harris at the 2012 Ocean Sciences Meeting and lured him into drinking some beers with us. Many squeees were squeeed. Probably this is more of a fun story than a necessary disclosure. Oh, well.

References:

Buesseler, K. O., S. R. Jayne, N. S. Fisher, I. I. Rypina, H. Baumann, Z. Baumann, C. F. Breier, E. M. Douglass, J. George, A. M. Macdonald, H. Miyamoto, J. Nishikawa, S. M. Pike, and S. Yoshida. 2012. Fukushima-Derived Radionuclides in the Ocean and Biota Off Japan. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109:5984–5988. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1120794109.

Madigan, D.J., Bauman Z. and Fisher N.S. Pacific bluefin tuna transport Fukushima-derived radionuclides from Japan to California. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Published online before print May 29, 2012, doi:10.1073/pnas.1204859109.

The post Detectable but not hazardous: radioactive marine life of Fukushima first appeared on Deep Sea News.

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The post Amazing Fukushima-related spam first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Debris from the 2011 Japanese tsunami is headed towards Hawaii and the North American west coast. For those concerned, several new sources of information are now available on the web:

Explainers: NOAA has a new video and podcast explaining how the debris is moving across the ocean, and what you can do to help. (Click through – it can’t embed). Ocean Conservancy also has a really nice explainer webpage. Though this isn’t new, the NOAA Marine Debris program also has a tsunami FAQ page.

NOAA visualization of debris track: Here is a visualization of the possible debris track from the NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory. (Again, you must click through, sorry.) It is based off 5 years of historical weather patterns, and is an approximation of a path the debris may take. For another look at possible debris paths, see my post on how scientists tracked tsunami debris to 700 miles off Midway Island.

Webinar: Japanese Tsunami Marine Debris: Anticipating and Mitigating Its Impacts on the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. This webinar took place last Monday, and a video is now available for those who couldn’t catch it live. You can also see my tweets at @seaplexscience. If you are interested in more events of this type, sign up for the MarineDebris.Info listserv.

National Geographic story on tourists paying to go on an expedition to hunt for the debris field with the NGOs Algalita Marine Research Foundation and 5 Gyres.

Transpacific Tsunami Debris Presentation by Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Jim Ingraham. Dr. Ebbesmeyer is the physical oceanographer famed for tracking rubber duckies and Nike sneakers across the world’s oceans, and Jim Ingraham is a retired NOAA oceanographer who developed the Ocean Surface CURrent Simulator (OSCURS) model. (The OSCURS model is the basis for the debris path models linked to above.) The presentation was given at Peninsula College (Port Angeles, WA) on December, 13th 2011 and sponsored by Peninsula College, Coastal Watershed Institute and the Olympic Peninsula Chapter of Surfrider Foundation.

The post Japanese tsunami debris link roundup first appeared on Deep Sea News.

T

The tsunami debris map above is a mathematical model, but it has a basis in the real world – it’s based on the paths taken by thousands of freely drifting buoys. The Global Drifter Program (GDP) currently tracks 1,037 of these buoys throughout the world’s oceans, and explains their design like this:

The modern drifter is a high-tech version of the “message in a bottle”. It consists of a surface buoy and a subsurface drogue (sea anchor), attached by a long, thin tether. The buoy measures temperature and other properties, and has a transmitter to send the data to passing satellites. The drogue dominates the total area of the instrument and is centered at a depth of 15 meters beneath the sea surface.

The drifters are easily deployed off any ship – you just toss them overboard (I’ve done this! It’s fun!) – which makes them a relatively inexpensive way of getting a lot of information about how the ocean’s surface moves and changes. All this information can be incorporated into mathematical models of how drifting objects move through the ocean, making these models more accurate. Drs. Maximenko and Hafner used this data to create the Surface CUrrents from a Diagnostic model (SCUD), which incorporates real-time satellite data and drifter tracks to predict how tsunami debris will move across the Pacific.

However, a drifting buoy with a 45-foot sea anchor is going to move pretty differently than tsunami debris that contains everything from cars to boats to the contents of people’s houses. That’s why it’s very important to test these models in the real world. Fortunately, the STS Pallada, a Russian sail training vessel going from Hawaii to Vladivostok, had Maximenko & Hafner’s debris maps and kept a eye out for tsunami debris. (The nonprofit organizations Algalita & 5 Gyres are also mounting an expedition to find the tsunami debris, scheduled to depart in May 2012).

Here’s what the crew of the Pallada found. From the UH press release (PDF):

“Yesterday, i.e. on September 22, in position 31 042,21 N and 174 045,21 E [about 700 miles northwest of Midway], we picked up on board the Japanese fishing boat. Radioactivity level – normal, we’ve measured it with the Geiger counter,” writes Natalia Borodina, Information and Education Mate of the Pallada. “At the approaches to the mentioned position (maybe 10 – 15 minutes before) we also sighted a TV set, fridge and a couple of other home appliances.”

Later, on September 27: “We keep sighting every day things like wooden boards, plastic bottles, buoys from fishing nets (small and big ones), an object resembling wash basin, drums, boots, other wastes. All these objects are floating by the ship.”

The debris is exactly where Maximenko & Hafner’s SCUD model predicted it would be! This means that we have a reasonably accurate method for predicting where the debris will go, and when it will make landfall. People on the US West Coast states are very concerned – here’s a recent article from Oregon Beach Connection worrying about the debris’ arrival in 2013 – but we are actually fairly well protected by the southbound California Current. It’s the the Hawaiian Islands that are going to bear the brunt of the impact. Hawaii gets nailed twice – first on the eastward journey, then again once the debris gets swept south in California Current (off the US West Coast), into the North Equatorial Current underneath the trade winds, and west to Hawaii. This is terrible for Hawaii’s fragile ecosystem, which already has a huge marine debris problem, but at least we know it’s coming and can prepare.

If you are concerned about marine debris and want to get involved, the most important thing is to get baseline data now, before the tsunami debris arrives. The easiest way to do this is to download the Marine Debris Tracker app (for Android and iPhone) and start recording what you find and where you find it. If you want your data to be scientific, the NOAA Marine Debris program has a Shoreline Survey Field Guide that they’ll send you – just email MDsightings@gmail.com.

The accuracy of Maximenko & Hafner’s SCUD model is a product of 50 years of government investment in basic science. All aspects of the model required huge investment in seemingly obscure measurements, such as watching buoys drift around in the ocean and developing satellites that measure wind and sea surface height. (Incidentally, the US satellite that measured wind went offline in 2009 and has not been replaced.)  Can’t you imagine a politician making fun of scientists using “high-tech messages in a bottle”? But the SCUD model is just another reason that it’s never a waste of resources to understand how the world works. Because we’ve made these investments, we have the information we need to reduce some of the consequences of the tsunami’s unpredictable destruction.

The post How scientists found debris from the Japanese tsunami 700 miles off Midway first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Japanese engineers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant have been forced to release radioactive waste water into the sea…Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) was forced on Monday to release low-level radioactive seawater that had been used to cool overheated fuel rods after it ran out of storage capacity for more highly contaminated water. A TEPCO official was in tears as he told a news conference: “We are very sorry for this region and those involved.” The water, which is being released to free storage capacity for more highly contaminated water, is about 100 times more radioactive than legal limits. Koichi Nakamura, a deputy director-general of Japan’s Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), told a news conference in Vienna about 11,500 metric tons of water would have to be discharged….Engineers planned to build two giant “silt curtains” made of polyester fabric in the sea to hinder the spread of more contamination from the plant.

via Japan seeks Russian help to end nuclear crisis | Reuters.

The post Japan Releases Radioactive Water Into Sea first appeared on Deep Sea News.

For most of us regular folks, this is the sort of shit that would make us throw up our hands, swear loudly, and resign ourselves to a lifetime of hopeless misery.

But Hideaki Akaiwa isn’t a regular guy. He’s a fucking insane badass, and he wasn’t going to sit back and just let his wife die alone, freezing to death in a miserable water-filled tomb. He was going after her. No matter what.

Hideaki maintained his composure and navigated his way through the submerged city, finally tracking down his old house. He quickly swam through to find his totally-freaked-out wife, alone and stranded on the upper level of their house, barely keeping her head above water. He grabbed her tight, and presumably sharing his rebreather with her, dragged her out of the wreckage to safety. She survived.

OH. MY. GOD. This guy is amazing. In all seriousness, I would send this guy a case of Dogfish Head. In all the tragedy of what’s happened in the last couple weeks in Japan (so glad to finally hear from you Takehiko!). This story of Akaiwa is a refreshing tale and he is justifiably the Badass of the Week, should be Badass of the Year. Of course, as with any good natural disaster movie, the story doesn’t end there….

But Hideaki Akaiwa still wasn’t done yet.

Now, I’m sure you’re wondering what the fuck is more intense than commandeering a wet suit, face-punching a tsunami and dragging your wife of two decades out of the flooded wreckage of your home, but, no shit, it gets even better. You see, Hideaki’s mother also lived in Ishinomaki, and she was still unaccounted for. I think you all know where this is going.

(and it doesn’t stop with his mother too….)

This whole report from Badass of the Week is worth the read in its entirety. Hideaki better get an agent to help him negotiate the movie rights to this story. I would love to get a hold of him for an interview! Maybe a guest post for scuba tsunami rescue gear review. Hideaki Akaiwa, you ARE a real life action superhero – frikkin Aquaman!

The post Give Akaiwa A Medal and a Life Supply of Sapporo Already! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Japans half-billion-dollar deep-sea drilling vessel was also a casualty of the tsunami following the massive 11 March earthquake.The Chikyu was docked at Hachinohe, 250 kilometers north of Sendai, on 11 March when the rise‑and‑fall of water levels caused it to scrape bottom. That collision snapped off one of the six thrusters that maintain the ships position while drilling, a feature that makes it so valuable for deep-sea drilling. As a result, a 68-day research expedition to study the deep coal bed biosphere off Shimokita, Japan, has been canceled.Asahiko Taira, a vice president of the Japan Agency for Marine‑Earth Science and Technology, said that it will take 2 to 3 months to repair the vessel. No word on any rescheduling of the expedition, which was sponsored by the international Integrated Ocean Drilling Program.At the time of the tsunami, Chikyu scientists were hosting a class of schoolchildren on a field trip. “The tsunami washed into the harbor; there was no way to escape,” Taira told Science. All those aboard evacuated safely

via Quake Scuttles Mission to Study Deep-Sea Carbon – ScienceInsider.

The post Japan’s Drilling Vessel Chikyu Damaged By Tsunami first appeared on Deep Sea News.