Japans tsunami debris heading our way.

[powderman]

      Up to 20 million tons of debris from Japan’s tsunami moving toward Hawaii    By Laura Rozen
Senior Foreign Affairs Reporter 
   
  Debris from Japan's tsunami approaching Hawaii. (KITV/ABC)
Some 5 to 20 million tons of debris--furniture, fishing boats, refrigerators--sucked into the Pacific Ocean in the wake of Japan's March 11 earthquake and tsunami are moving rapidly across the Pacific. Researchers from the University of Hawaii tracking the wreckage estimate it could approach the U.S. West Coast in the next three years, the UK Daily Mail reports.
"We have a rough estimate of 5 to 20 million tons of debris coming from Japan," University of Hawaii researcher Jan Hafner told Hawaii's ABC affiliate KITV.
Crew members from the Russian training ship the STS Pallada "spotted the debris 2,000 miles from Japan," last month after passing the Midway islands, the Mail wrote. "They saw some pieces of furniture, some appliances, anything that can float, and they picked up a fishing boat," said Hafner. The boat was 20-feet long, and was painted with the word "Fukushima."  "That's actually our first confirmed report of tsunami debris," Hafner told KITV.

  Crew on Russian ship STS Pallada spotted the debris almost 2,000 miles from Japan, including a fishing boat from …
 

  Researchers say up to 20 mn tons of debris from Japan's March 11 tsunami could reach U.S. West Coast in three years. …
The 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami that hit northeastern Japan on March 11 has left some 20,000 people dead or missing.

[DalesCarpentry]

I wonder if any bodies are among the debris? Talk about pollution thats up there with all the plastic bottles floating around in the ocean. I know this could not be helped but the ocean is a fragile environment and we are slowly killing our oceans. I am not a tree hugger by any stretch but I do feel we need to clean up and take better care of our oceans. Dale

[magooch]

I agree that man should not intentionally polute the Earth's waters, or land, but often mother nature does a pretty good job of poluting it and cleaning it up.  It just takes a very long time sometimes.  Man's contribution during WW II was enormous compared to other incidents caused by man, but we seem to have recovered from that. 
 
Mother nature caused the mess from Japan, so I recon she's going to have to help out in the cleanup.

[Conan The Librarian]

One man's debris is another man's treasure.  I could use a lot of that stuff. Pretty nice boat. Roof for a car port. Good, usable lumber. Send in on over here. I could build a house out of the stuff in the top picture.

[BUGEYE]

One man's debris is another man's treasure.  I could use a lot of that stuff. Pretty nice boat. Roof for a car port. Good, usable lumber. Send in on over here. I could build a house out of the stuff in the top picture.

it could be a scroungers paradise.  and any bodies would be long gone.

[Conan The Librarian]

Good point! The radiation is an ongoing story of terrible proportions, and it's basically being ignored. This is more drastic than any other spill, including the relatively minor and very temporary Exxon Valdez spill. This radiation has been pouring into the ocean for about six months.
 
Keep also in mind that it's not just radiation per se. These chemicals are the most toxic known to man.

[BUGEYE]

I would venture to say that the radiation would be washed out in a three year trip across the pacific.

[briarpatch]

I wonder if the clown will call this... imports and tax us on it.

[Pat/Rick]

Yep, planning on spending even more time at the beach house in a couple of more years. Don't know how much will "hit" WA coastline but we'll see.

[magooch]

Hey, I live close to one of the longest beaches in the world; right here in Washington state.  This garbage bonanza might be great for bidness.  I can see it now--a beachcomber rental outfit where you could rent frontend loaders and carrydeck cranes.

[lakota]

Sounds like a great opportunity for someone to claim the trash as inventory to open one of those crappy dollar tree stores.

[briarpatch]

I have a hard time getting my head around 20,000,000 tons of debris. I watched some of the film on the tsunami and dont doubt it. It wiped the Island clean in several places.
Somewhere in that mess is thousands of bodies. By the time it gets here, guess they should be gone.

[blind ear]

Tens of thousands of cargo containers along with thousands of ships and boats are lost in the Pacific ocean each year. Much of it ends up circleing for years in the Pacific. There is a program where the debre is tracked to see how long it has been at sea and identified by shipping records, storm losses etc. Little "yellow rubber duckies" are the best known catagorie.
 
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0731/p01s04-woeu.html
 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-464768/Thousands-rubber-ducks-land-British-shores-15-year-journey.html
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_debris
 
Anything that is it's self "radio active" is a metal. Unless carried by other floating debre it will sink. Of course, small particles will bum a ride but will usualy have little output. ear

[Rex in OTZ]

Anyone who has saild across the upper Pacific can tell you all about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
 
http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/great-pacific-garbage-patch-photos-460410
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_pollution Great Pacific Garbage Patch In 1997,While returning (Charles J Moore)to southern California after finishing the Los Angeles-to-Hawaii Transpac sailing race, he and his crew caught sight of trash floating in the North Pacific Gyre, one of the most remote regions of the ocean. He wrote articles about the extent of this garbage, and the effects on sea life, which attracted significant attention in the media.
“As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean,” Moore later wrote in an essay for Natural History, “I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.” An oceanographic colleague of Moore’s dubbed this floating junk yard “the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” and despite Moore’s efforts to suggest different metaphors — “a swirling sewer,” “a superhighway of trash” connecting two “trash cemeteries” — “Garbage Patch” appears to have stuck.
His 1999 study showed that there was 6 times more plastic in this part of the ocean than the zooplankton that feeds ocean life.^[3] In 2002, a later study showed that even off the coast of California, plastic outweighed zooplankton by a factor of 2:5. These numbers were significantly higher than expected, and shocked many oceanographers.
Bottle caps, toothbrushes, umbrella handles, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice were a common sight in the Pacific garbage patch. This sample of ocean water shows the prevalence of trash in the ocean and disproves the notion of the patch as a floating oceanic landfill. It's much more like a plastic soup with tiny pieces that, from a distance -- like the bow of a ship -- are barely discernible to the naked eye.


 
Bottle caps, toothbrushes, umbrella handles, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice were a common sight in the Pacific garbage patch. This sample of ocean water shows the prevalence of trash in the ocean and disproves the notion of the patch as a floating oceanic landfill. It's much more like a plastic soup with tiny pieces that, from a distance -- like the bow of a ship -- are barely discernible to the naked eye.


Read more: http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/great-pacific-garbage-patch-photos-460410#ixzz1cV2vCVrpRead more: http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/great-pacific-garbage-patch-photos-460410#ixzz1cV2vCVrp
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_debris
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch