"The ocean is broken!"
NO LIFE FOR 3000 MILES!
By
GREG RAY, Oct. 18, 2013.
http://www.theherald.com.au/story/1848433/the-ocean-is-broken/
Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line.
"There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice," Macfadyen recalled.
But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two.
No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all.
"In years gone by I'd gotten used to all the birds and their noises," he said.
"They'd be following the boat, sometimes resting on the mast before taking off again. You'd see flocks of them wheeling over the surface of the sea in the distance, feeding on pilchards."
But in March and April this year, only silence and desolation surrounded his boat, Funnel Web, as it sped across the surface of a haunted ocean.No wonder the sea was dead. No wonder his baited lines caught nothing. There was nothing to catch.
If that sounds depressing, it only got worse.
The next leg of the long voyage was from Osaka to San Francisco and for most of that trip the desolation was tinged with nauseous horror and a degree of fear.
"After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead," Macfadyen said.
"We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.
"I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen."
In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes.
"Part of it was the aftermath of the tsunami that hit Japan a couple of years ago. The wave came in over the land, picked up an unbelievable load of stuff and carried it out to sea. And it's still out there, everywhere you look."
Ivan's brother, Glenn, who boarded at Hawaii for the run into the United States, marvelled at the "thousands on thousands" of yellow plastic buoys. The huge tangles of synthetic rope, fishing lines and nets. Pieces of polystyrene foam by the million. And slicks of oil and petrol, everywhere.
Countless hundreds of wooden power poles are out there, snapped off by the killer wave and still trailing their wires in the middle of the sea.
"In years gone by, when you were becalmed by lack of wind, you'd just start your engine and motor on," Ivan said.
Not this time.
"In a lot of places we couldn't start our motor for fear of entangling the propeller in the mass of pieces of rope and cable. That's an unheard of situation, out in the ocean.
"If we did decide to motor we couldn't do it at night, only in the daytime with a lookout on the bow, watching for rubbish.
"On the bow, in the waters above Hawaii, you could see right down into the depths. I could see that the debris isn't just on the surface, it's all the way down. And it's all sizes, from a soft-drink bottle to pieces the size of a big car or truck.
"We saw a factory chimney sticking out of the water, with some kind of boiler thing still attached below the surface. We saw a big container-type thing, just rolling over and over on the waves.
"We were weaving around these pieces of debris. It was like sailing through a garbage tip.
"Below decks you were constantly hearing things hitting against the hull, and you were constantly afraid of hitting something really big. As it was, the hull was scratched and dented all over the place from bits and pieces we never saw."
Plastic was ubiquitous. Bottles, bags and every kind of throwaway domestic item you can imagine, from broken chairs to dustpans, toys and utensils.
And something else. The boat's vivid yellow paint job, never faded by sun or sea in years gone past, reacted with something in the water off Japan, losing its sheen in a strange and unprecedented way.
BACK in Newcastle, Ivan Macfadyen is still coming to terms with the shock and horror of the voyage.
"The ocean is broken," he said, shaking his head in stunned disbelief.
Recognising the problem is vast, and that no organisations or governments appear to have a particular interest in doing anything about it, Macfadyen is looking for ideas.
He plans to lobby government ministers, hoping they might help.
More immediately, he will approach the organisers of Australia's major ocean races, trying to enlist yachties into an international scheme that uses volunteer yachtsmen to monitor debris and marine life.
Macfadyen signed up to this scheme while he was in the US, responding to an approach by US academics who asked yachties to fill in daily survey forms and collect samples for radiation testing - a significant concern in the wake of the tsunami and consequent nuclear power station failure in Japan.
"I asked them why don't we push for a fleet to go and clean up the mess," he said.
"But they said they'd calculated that the environmental damage from burning the fuel to do that job would be worse than just leaving the debris there."
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A SAFE LEVEL OF RADIATION!
FROM PLANKTON TO ANCHOVIES TO GREAT WHALES, DOLPHINS, WALRUSES, SEALS, SAMON, TUNA, SEA BIRDS, ALL REPORTED WASHING ASHORE DEAD ALL ALONG THE PACIFIC RIM.
RADIATION BURNS EVIDENT ON FISH FOUND ALONG THE SHORES OF NORTH AMERICA, SOUTH AMERICA, AUSTRALIA, HAWAII...FISH FAIL TO MAKE SPAWNING RUNS, LARGE SEA MAMMALS AVOIDING THEIR USUAL MIGRATION ROUTES THROUGH THE PACIFIC.
HOW FUKUSHIMA RADIATION IS POISONING THE SEA.
ANOTHER VIDEO THAT BLOGGER LISTS AS "NO VIDEO FOUND", BUT IT IS THERE, JUST CLICK ON THE LINK.
http://youtu.be/AXvu0JGHzYY
THE EVIDENCE IS OVERWHELMING. THIS RECENT REPORT, ABOVE, BY THOSE WHO SAILED THROUGH THIS IS ONLY ONE OF THOUSANDS.
RADIATION SO HIGH EVEN ROBOTS CAN'T LAST BUT MINUTES, IF AT ALL.
THIS WAS REPORTED OVER A YEAR AGO.
IS ANYONE, ANYWHERE AWARE OF WHAT'S REALLY HAPPENING?
WHY ARE NATIONS ALLOWING THE CONSUMPTION OF TAINTED SEAFOODS?
DOES ANYONE CARE?
THE 20 STUDIES IN LINK ABOVE INCLUDE:
1~ Inverse estimation of source parameters of oceanic radioactivity dispersion models associated with the Fukushima accident
2~ Surface pathway of radioactive plume of TEPCO Fukushima NPP1 released 134Cs and 137Cs
3~ Determination of plutonium isotopes in marine sediments off the Fukushima coast following the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant accident
4~ Iodine-129 concentration in seawater near Fukushima before and after the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant
5~ Short-term dispersal of Fukushima-derived radionuclides off Japan: modeling efforts and model-data intercomparison
6~ Initial Spread of 137Cs over the shelf of Japan: a study using the high-resolution global-coastal nesting ocean model
7~ Direct observation of 134Cs and 137Cs in surface seawater in the western and central North Pacific after the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant accident
8~ 90Sr and 89Sr in seawater off Japan as a consequence of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear accident
9~ Fukushima-derived radiocesium in western North Pacific sediment traps
10~ Natural and Fukushima-derived radioactivity in macroalgae and mussels along the Japanese shoreline
11~ Export of 134Cs and 137Cs in the Fukushima river systems at heavy rains by Typhoon Roke in September 2011
12~ Continuing 137Cs release to the sea from the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant through 2012
13~ The impact of oceanic circulation and phase transfer on the dispersion of radionuclides released from the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant
14~ Does the Fukushima NPP disaster affect the caesium activity of North Atlantic Ocean fish?
15~ Spatiotemporal distributions of Fukushima-derived radionuclides in surface sediments in the waters off Miyagi, Fukushima, and Ibaraki Prefectures, Japan
16~ Distribution of the Fukushima-derived radionuclides in seawater in the Pacific off the coast of Miyagi, Fukushima, and Ibaraki Prefectures, Japan
17~ Cesium-134 and 137 activities in the central North Pacific Ocean after the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant accident
18~ Horizontal distribution of Fukushima-derived radiocesium in zooplankton in the northwestern Pacific Ocean
19~ One-year, regional-scale simulation of 137Cs radioactivity in the ocean following the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident
20~ Cesium, iodine and tritium in NW Pacific waters -- a comparison of the Fukushima impact with global fallout
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