A closer look at curious anomalies in the Pacific Ocean — The Inertia

This article was published on Dec. 17, 2013, but it includes one of the best collections of “curious anomalies” of sick, dying and migrating animals and marine life in the Pacific Ocean and United States since the Fukushima disaster. It sites independent studies regarding blue fun tuna, starfish, sharks, dolphins, orcas and sea lions, as well as increased shark attacks in Hawaii and dying moose and other animals in Minnesota. As they say, “Correlation does not equal causation,” but from what we know, there are a lot of coincidences of dying organisms in the Pacific Ocean whose causes of death have not been thoroughly investigated.

” Curious anomalies are taking place in the Pacific Ocean. Shark attacks in Hawaii are at a record setting high—13 this year and two fatal—more than three times the annual average for the area. Marine life along California’s shores has increased to an unprecedented presence in recent months, with sightings in Monterey Bay and Santa Cruz of more than 200 humpback whales, a pod of 19 orcas, countless sea lions, and so many anchovies corralled into Santa Cruz Harbor that the water ran out of oxygen and caused a massive anchovy die-off, as reported by the NY Times. In even weirder news, sea stars off the North American coastline, healthy to the point of overpopulation a few months ago, are currently suffering from a wasting-syndrome of unidentified origins, causing them to mutilate and melt in masses from Canada to Mexico in the largest and least explainable sea star die-off in history.

As of now, these incidents are generally unexplained and unconnected in public claims of the scientific community. But there’s one underlying precedent that might explain them all. Fukushima Daiichi.

Nearly three years ago now, on March 11, 2011, the magnitude 9.0 Tohoku Oki Earthquake rocked Japan and wiped out power sources for the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant. After a first, second, and then third failure of backup coolant systems caused by the earthquake’s subsequent tsunami that easily overwhelmed the plant’s sea walls, fuel rods melted in their reactors, the buildings that housed those reactors were crippled by massive explosions, and by March 15, 2011, unknown amounts of radioactive matter flooded irrepressibly into the surrounding environment. It is the largest nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl incident of 1986. Possibly larger. For two months after the earthquake, the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the operators of Fukushima I, denied that any meltdowns had occurred at the plant.

Fast forward two years and change to July 22, 2013 to when TEPCO finally announced its estimation that 400 tons of radioactive wastewater have been draining into the Pacific Ocean each day since the incident. The Japanese government took hold of the situation upon this announcement, and later revealed that an additional 300 metric tons of highly contaminated radioactive wastewater had spilled from a storage tank into the groundwater, and in turn, into the Pacific.

A team at the Radioisotope Center at the University of Tokyo, lead by Dr. Tatsuhiko Kodama, recently conducted a study to measure the amount of radioactive contamination caused by the meltdown at Fukushima I. They concluded, “The total amount of leakage to be about 29.6 times the amount of radiation caused by the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Assuming the source material to be Uranium, we think the total amount of leakage is about 20 times the contamination caused by the Hiroshima bomb.”

So, where’s the connection to the anomalies of sea life, and why such a delayed reaction?

A few variables appear to be at hand. First, the reaction of the ocean hasn’t been delayed. It’s public acknowledgement that’s been slow to catch up. In the summer of 2012, scientists at Stanford University caught 15 Pacific Bluefin tuna off the California coast for research. Of those 15 tuna, 100 percent tested positive for the radioisotopes cesium-137 and cesium-134, the same toxic matter found in fish from Swedish lakes following the Chernobyl disaster. Follow-up research from the study reveals that Pacific Bluefin tuna, which are born many miles offshore from Japan and surrounding areas and migrate eastward toward California, continue to show up on the North American coastline with traceable amounts of the radioactive byproducts. Yet the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) refuses to test fish on the West Coast for radiation.

In August 2013, an independent fisheries scientist in British Columbia, Alexandra Morton, discovered fish off the west coast of British Columbia [Canada] suffering from a mysterious disease that’s causing them to hemorrhage. Of the herring she encountered during a beach seine on Malcolm Island, north of Vancouver Island, Morton noted, “I’ve never seen fish looking this bad[…]These little herring[…]were not only bleeding from their fins, but from their bellies, their chins, their eyeballs[…]It was 100 percent. I couldn’t find any that weren’t bleeding to some degree. And they were schooling with young sockeye salmon.” Four months later, sea stars along the North American coastline are being wiped out by similar, unexplainable symptoms. Radiation poisoning is a viable cause, though its relation hasn’t been confirmed publicly. … ”

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