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The ocean is broken
- iterationx 13y agoThis is one tiny piece of a lot of troubling fukushima news http://www.okcfox.com/story/23728488/scientists-puzzled-as-rare-sea-monsters-wash-ashore http://www.okcfox.com/story/23728488/scientists-puzzled-as-r... http://www.vancouversun.com/travel/Sudden+disappearance+sardines+serious+economic+ecological/9034961/story.html http://www.vancouversun.com/travel/Sudden+disappearance+sard... http://rt.com/news/fukushima-apocalypse-fuel-removal-598/ http://rt.com/news/fukushima-apocalypse-fuel-removal-598/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/fukushima-plant-could-be-sickening-killing-ringed-seals-in-alaska/2011/12/28/gIQATdPhMP_blog.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/fukushima-...
- cbennett 13y agoAnd the bad news gets worse, this is from yesterday: "Officials of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said on Friday they detected 400,000 becquerels per liter of beta ray-emitting radioactive substances - including strontium - at the site, a level 6,500 times higher than readings taken on Wednesday, NHK World reported." "On Wednesday TEPCO said it had detected high levels of radiation in a ditch leading to the Pacific Ocean, and that it suspected heavy rains had lifted contaminated soil." We are talking about some non-zero (lets just say integer) chance of global catastrophe if the oxgenation of the Pacific ocean is disrupted by mass radioactive spoiling of biomass. I don't understand why a concerted organisation of nuclear engineers and assistants are not stepping in to avert what could be game over for Japan in general, to say nothing of cascading affects across the oceans and N. Hemisphere in general. http://rt.com/news/fukushima-high-radioactivity-well-335/ http://rt.com/news/fukushima-high-radioactivity-well-335/
- Pitarou 13y ago> We are talking about some non-zero (lets just say integer) chance of global catastrophe if the oxgenation of the Pacific ocean is disrupted by mass radioactive spoiling of biomass. Well, the trees on-site are still green. I'm not trying to minimise the problem. I know there's a lot of uranium in there. But not enough to sterilise an ocean.
- andor 13y agoFukushima is very troubling, but at least it was only an accident. The overfishing mentioned in the article is systemic.
- functional_test 13y agoThe article also mentioned the other effects of the tsunami: telephone poles, styrofoam, pieces of buildings, etc. were all still floating. Again, an accident, but it's hard to deny that it's preventable; at least one town was saved by a sea wall that was relatively inexpensive to build [1]. That said, overfishing is probably the worse problem since it's not tractable to enforce regulations (since police aren't on site to ensure that there isn't too much "extra" catch thrown back, etc.). At least it would be possible to mandate the construction of seawalls. [1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/The-Japanese-mayor-laughed-building-huge-sea-wall--village-left-untouched-tsunami.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/The-Japanese...
- iterationx 13y agoThe radiation is ongoing and cumulative. You speak about it as if its something that has happened and is over.
- DanielBMarkham 13y agoWhen I read these types of articles, I always end up doing a bit of mental translation in my head to make sense of it. The ocean is obviously not "broken". It is a large body of salt water covering the majority of the planet's surface. It still exists as a liquid, therefore it's still an "ocean" A more useful translation of the title is "The ocean had a lot of artistic meaning to me in the past. A recent trip demonstrated to me that this artistic value is now gone" Very difficult to get clicks for, sure, but at least with the modified title I can pick it up and know what to do with it. It's a shame the author had this experience. I too like the birds and water without debris. I wonder, though: is the state of the entire ocean the same as this author indicates? Or might he be using a bit of artistic license and hyperbole to emphasize his loss? I feel that he's probably stretching things quite a bit for effect, but that's fine. After all, the point is his emoting to us and us understanding his feelings. I was able to feel what he was feeling. Very well done. The problem here, however, is trying to have some sort of public policy discussion based on what amounts to a poetic interpretation of reality. Just what is the ocean supposed to do? Look pretty? Purify our air? What job do we assign the ocean that it can then fail or succeed at? Do we owe some consideration to a large body of water that we don't to, say, a rock? Or is the ocean's "job" just to keep us alive? These are subjective questions. Different people can have widely different answers to them. We make a mistake when we jump from a nicely written article about one man's personal loss at his view of the changing state of a large body of salt water and deciding what's right or wrong for everybody else in the world. So I liked it, but with caution. Many readers will be unable to both appreciate the author's loss and keep in mind the context of these types of works. It all just bleeds together to them.
- mrcactu5 13y agothe human need for potable water is not subjective
- mindstab 13y agoIt has nothing to do with "artistic meaning". The ocean's are acidifying and being over fished at the same time. The entire ocean ecosystem is collapsing. Soon there will be no fish, the ocean will be fully of jelly fish. Ecosystem's dependant on the "old way" will be next up to start collapsing. Oh right, and we need the ocean as a carbon sync and it generates most of the oxygen on the planet. But yeah, it's all about the art. Nothing to do with the ocean being an incredibly complicated delicate life support system for the planet that we are breaking...
- Shivetya 13y agoTime to build a million year wall around this plant, deep enough to protect the aquifer and big enough to keep it from the ocean and the ocean from it.
- Turing_Machine 13y agoNo, more like "time to learn how to do arithmetic", such as how little something like Fukushima amounts to when diluted in a volume the size of the Pacific Ocean. The Soviets used to dump scrap ship reactors into the Arctic Ocean whole. Many of them, and over a long period of time.
- null_ptr 13y agoIt all adds up, and over a long period of time.
- Turing_Machine 13y agoNot really. The ocean already has 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium in it. That's the equivalent of 45 MILLION reactors. And of course the Fukushima reactor wasn't dumped in the ocean whole to begin with.
- Turing_Machine 13y agoLet's actually do the arithmetic here. I don't have an exact number for this reactor, but several sources indicate that nuclear reactors have something of the order of 100 tonnes of uranium in them (there are also fission products, of course, but those are in much smaller quantities). The oceans have about 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium in them from natural sources. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/nuclear-fuel-from-the-sea http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/nuclear-fuel-from-th... It should be clear that even if you ground up the entire Fukushima reactor into a fine powder and dumped it straight into the ocean, it wouldn't make the slightest difference. Can a reactor disaster pollute the local region, including ground water? Certainly. Can a reactor disaster make a significant difference in something the volume of the Pacific Ocean? No, it's sheer nonsense.
- mrcactu5 13y agoYep. Everytime I through it down the trash or toilet I wonder where it's going for about a minute. Then I forget about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isla_de_basura http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isla_de_basura
- javajosh 13y agoIn general, I want a little more evidence than this before declaring global catastrophe. For example, I'd like to get confirmation of the problem from NOAA[1], particularly the NMFS[2]. Alternatively, Green Peace[3] would no doubt be one of the first organizations to raise an alarm - they care about the ocean, and presumably gather signals from many sources. I want confirmation because the simple fact is that it's impossible to get a comprehensive picture of the Pacific's health from one voyage - there are too many variables at play. The skeptic in me questions the tacit assumption (the one that makes the OP's observations so troubling) that the entire Pacific is normally teaming with fish. However, I assume that fish travel in schools, and that fish density is wildly variable. E.g. there are normally vast swaths of the Pacific that are "dead". Indeed, anyone going out to fish for sport knows that fish aren't uniformly distributed, and they don't stay in one place. In the open ocean, these schools are vast, but so are the dead zones when there are no schools. That said, not being in the field, I'm not sure how we gauge the health of an entire ocean from a "supported biomass" perspective. Nor do I know anything about who would be responsible for officially raising an alarm about global catastrophe. Or if they did, what we could do about it. It seems like the only thing we really could do is reduce the rate at which we harm the ocean, rather than dumping into it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Oceanic_and_Atmospheric_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Oceanic_and_Atmospher..., http://www.noaa.gov/ http://www.noaa.gov/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Marine_Fisheries_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Marine_Fisheries_Serv..., http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/ http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/ [3] http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/ http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/
- Jakob 13y agoIt seems an expedition of 2012 which included the NOAA did confirm this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch#cite_note-PhD-52 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch#ci...
- cbennett 13y agoYou are right to be skeptical in the fact that anecdotal evidence from a yachting voyage could establish a general case for mass bio-mass (or lets just say a sub-set of bio-mass, like catchable fish) decline, and your point that large portions of the Pacific are normally dead-zones is true because of the way that anoxic regions can develop due to oceanic circulations of nutrients and dissolved oxygen concentrations. But, you might be concerned to learn that the NOAA typically only reports on mass die offs fairly close to US shores, at least within our EEZ zone- because they are only adequately funded to do so- [1] is an example of such a report. There is no well-funded transnational environmental authority that can make a reliable 'alarm' about the potential of mass common-water oceanic die-offs (think 'tragedy of the commons'); Greenpeace is more of an advocacy organization than a scientific or monitoring authority. One thing we can indirectly empirically gauge is the size of these large garbage patches at sea simply via imaging. In fact NOAA has put together a fact sheet on this [2], although it is rather simplistic. What we can glean from this is the fact that they are real, quite large, and if you look at the map it looks as though the OP's voyage passed through it at least once if not twice. Which would explain much of what he saw, but not necessarily the consistency (pervasiveness) of the dead zones observed.. Finally, just food for thought (er.. perhaps bad choice of words.. haha) that there is a sort of conflation in the article about the long-going decline of fish stocks and accumulation of garbage due to dumping and the more acute poisoning/death of fish stocks due to radioactive leakage from Fukushima in the areas off-coast Japan specifically. There is academic evidence [3] that large fish, specifically tuna, are acting as vector to transport large amounts of spoiled biomass as far afield as California. How much of the biomass die-off does this explain? I have absolutely no idea, but since both issues are quite concerning in their own right we should probably keep tabs on both.. [1] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/30/1227489/-Mass-Aquatic-Die-Offs-in-FL-NOAA-Declares-2nd-Unusual-Mortality-Event-Since-April http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/30/1227489/-Mass-Aquat... [2] http://marinedebris.noaa.gov/info/pdf/patch.pdf http://marinedebris.noaa.gov/info/pdf/patch.pdf [3] http://www.pnas.org/content/109/24/9483.short http://www.pnas.org/content/109/24/9483.short
- bokchoi 13y agoRelatedly, here is an excellent article on ocean acidification by the Seattle Times: http://apps.seattletimes.com/reports/sea-change/2013/sep/11/pacific-ocean-perilous-turn-overview/ http://apps.seattletimes.com/reports/sea-change/2013/sep/11/...
- bcl 13y agoNot really. Here is Cliff Mass' response: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2013/10/ocean-acidification-and-northwest.html http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2013/10/ocean-acidification-an...
- bokchoi 13y agoAnd their response to his response: http://blogs.seattletimes.com/seachange/2013/10/12/expert-critique-of-seattle-times-sea-change-project-ignores-the-science/ http://blogs.seattletimes.com/seachange/2013/10/12/expert-cr...