Japanese dock in tsunami lands in US
Source: Agencies |
June 8, 2012, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
WHEN a tsunami hit the northern coast of Japan last year, the waves ripped four dock floats the size of freight train boxcars from their pilings in the fishing port of Misawa and turned them over to the whims of wind and currents.
One floated up on a nearby island. Two have never been seen again. And one made an incredible journey across 8,000 kilometers of ocean that ended this week on a Oregon beach.
Along for the ride were hundreds of millions of individual organisms, including a tiny species of crab, a species of algae, and a little starfish all native to Japan that have scientists worried if they get a chance to spread out on the US West Coast.
"This is a very clear threat," said John Chapman, a research scientist at Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, where the dock float washed up early Tuesday. "It's exactly like saying you threw a bowling ball into a China shop. It's going to break something. But will it be valuable or cheap glass? It's incredibly difficult to predict what will happen next."
Plans were being considered by state authorities to scrape all living things off the dock and bury them in the sand, so they would not spread, Chapman said.
While scientists expect much of the floating debris to follow the currents to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an accumulation of millions of tons of small bits of plastic floating in the northern Pacific, tsunami debris that can catch the wind is making its way to North America.
In recent weeks a soccer ball washed up in Alaska. Improbably, a Harley Davidson motorcycle floated in a shipping container all the way to British Columbia.
Just how the dock float happened to turn up in Oregon was probably determined within sight of land in Japan, said Jan Hafner, a computer programmer in the University of Hawaii's International Pacific Research Center, which is tracking the 1.5 million tons of tsunami debris still be floating across the Pacific. That's where winds, currents and tides are most variable, he said.
A radiation check of the dock came up negative, which was to be expected if the dock broke loose before the nuclear power plant accident triggered by the waves, said Chris Havel, spokesman for the Oregon Department of Parks and Recreation, which is overseeing the removal of the Japanese dock.
One floated up on a nearby island. Two have never been seen again. And one made an incredible journey across 8,000 kilometers of ocean that ended this week on a Oregon beach.
Along for the ride were hundreds of millions of individual organisms, including a tiny species of crab, a species of algae, and a little starfish all native to Japan that have scientists worried if they get a chance to spread out on the US West Coast.
"This is a very clear threat," said John Chapman, a research scientist at Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, where the dock float washed up early Tuesday. "It's exactly like saying you threw a bowling ball into a China shop. It's going to break something. But will it be valuable or cheap glass? It's incredibly difficult to predict what will happen next."
Plans were being considered by state authorities to scrape all living things off the dock and bury them in the sand, so they would not spread, Chapman said.
While scientists expect much of the floating debris to follow the currents to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an accumulation of millions of tons of small bits of plastic floating in the northern Pacific, tsunami debris that can catch the wind is making its way to North America.
In recent weeks a soccer ball washed up in Alaska. Improbably, a Harley Davidson motorcycle floated in a shipping container all the way to British Columbia.
Just how the dock float happened to turn up in Oregon was probably determined within sight of land in Japan, said Jan Hafner, a computer programmer in the University of Hawaii's International Pacific Research Center, which is tracking the 1.5 million tons of tsunami debris still be floating across the Pacific. That's where winds, currents and tides are most variable, he said.
A radiation check of the dock came up negative, which was to be expected if the dock broke loose before the nuclear power plant accident triggered by the waves, said Chris Havel, spokesman for the Oregon Department of Parks and Recreation, which is overseeing the removal of the Japanese dock.
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