{"id":1567,"date":"2012-09-02T14:12:44","date_gmt":"2012-09-02T14:12:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nishiko55.com\/eq\/wordpress\/?p=1567"},"modified":"2018-05-17T14:18:51","modified_gmt":"2018-05-17T12:18:51","slug":"2-september-2012-ny-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nishiko55.com\/eq\/?p=1567","title":{"rendered":"2 September 2012 NY times"},"content":{"rendered":"

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http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/03\/13\/us\/looking-for-tsunami-debris-on-west-coast-beaches.html<\/a><\/p>\n

March 13, 2012<\/p>\n

On West Coast, Looking for Flotsam of a Disaster<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

By MALIA WOLLAN<\/p>\n

SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 John Anderson, a plumber by trade and a beachcomber by passion, has been trolling the shores of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State for more than three decades, and along the way has discovered almost every kind of flotsam one can imagine: toys, refrigerators, even the occasional message in a bottle.<\/p>\n

But in recent months, Mr. Anderson has been making a new, and somewhat surprising, find: dozens of buoys marked with Japanese writing, set adrift, he believes, by last year\u2019s catastrophic tsunami.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat wave wiped out whole towns, I\u2019m thinking just about anything could show up here,\u201d said Mr. Anderson, 58, of Forks, Wash. \u201cI\u2019ve heard people talking about floating safes full of Japanese money.\u201d<\/p>\n

The tsunami \u2014 which struck after a massive offshore earthquake last March 11 \u2014 sent a wall of water sweeping across much of Japan\u2019s eastern coastline and generated more than 20 million tons of debris<\/strong>, a jumbled mass of houses, cars, boats and belongings. And while it\u2019s not clear what percentage of that wreckage was sucked back out to sea and what remains afloat, what is certain is that some of it is slowly making its way to American shores.<\/p>\n

Computer models run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration<\/a> and by researchers from the University of Hawaii<\/a> predict that debris has moved eastward from the coast of Japan, driven by currents and wind. The models predict that bits of\u00a0detritus will begin washing up on the northwestern Hawaiian Islands this springand along the western coast of the United States and Canada in early 2013.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t think there is a massive debris field out there,<\/strong>\u201d said Nancy Wallace, director of\u00a0NOAA\u2019s Marine Debris Program<\/a>. \u201cIt will come up in little spurts here and there, a small trickle over years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Researchers think most of it will never reach shore and will instead get caught up and broken apart in the\u00a0\u201cgreat Pacific garbage patch\u201d<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0a swirling gyre of currents in the middle of the Pacific Ocean known to collect and recirculate floating garbage.<\/p>\n

But beachcombers say the debris has already begun to reach land.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like Paul Revere running through town, saying \u2018The British are coming!\u2019 and no lights are coming on,\u201d said a retired oceanographer, Curtis Ebbesmeyer. \u201cThe tsunami debris is here, but no one is listening.<\/strong>\u201d<\/p>\n

Co-author of \u201cFlotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man\u2019s Obsession With Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science,\u201d Mr. Ebbesmeyer, 69, also publishes Beachcombers\u2019 Alert<\/a>, a newsletter on all things flotsam and jetsam. He counts some 10,000 people in the loose-knit network of serious beachcombers who read his newsletter and report their seashore findings to him.
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

Mr. Ebbesmeyer said he had received more than 400 documented sightings of large black plastic and white Styrofoam buoys found between Kodiak, Alaska, and Humboldt County, Calif<\/strong>. Many of the buoys are marked with Japanese characters, including the names of oyster companies destroyed by the tsunami. The buoys corroborate computer modeling by Mr. Ebbesmeyer and an oceanographer colleague that predicted debris would begin landing as early as last fall.<\/p>\n

Despite a rise in interest and reported sightings, officials have not confirmed that any of the items found along the West Coast originated in Japan. \u201cThere is debris from Asia that comes to shore all the time, and it\u2019s not necessary tsunami-related,\u201d Ms. Wallace said.<\/p>\n

Thus far, only two tsunami debris clusters have been confirmed, a wrecked Japanese fishing boat spotted by a Russian ship that was en route from Honolulu to Vladivostok, Russia, and another vessel located by the United States Coast Guard nearer to Japan.<\/p>\n

Finding flotsam over some 5,000 miles of open ocean<\/strong> is not easy. A month after the disaster, the debris was no longer visible in NOAA\u2019s satellite images. To assist in the search, officials have requested higher-resolution satellite images from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which runs satellite-based mapping and monitoring for the Defense Department. In recent months, NOAA reached out to the commercial shipping and fishing groups, asking boats to report any large debris sightings in the water.<\/p>\n

NOAA has also called on a growing cadre of beachcombers to keep a lookout.<\/p>\n

Since January, the number of e-mails NOAA has received reporting tsunami debris has increased threefold. The Web page answering frequently asked questionsabout the tsunami gets more visitors than any of the program\u2019s other pages. NOAA also has a smartphone app<\/a><\/strong> for tracking debris found on beaches.<\/p>\n

Whether tsunami-related or not, officials encourage beachgoers to pick up and properly dispose of any garbage they find. \u201cRadioactivity is extremely unlikely,<\/strong>\u201d Ms. Wallace said, in part because the damaged Fukushima reactor did not begin leaking radioactive material until after the tsunami wave retreated.<\/p>\n

Tom Baty, an avid fisherman and a retiree, spends up to three hours a day walking the beaches of Point Reyes National Seashore<\/a> in California, where he picks up trash and sometimes tracks the location of plastic debris with a GPS device. Mr. Baty, 54, regularly finds tidbits of junk marked with Japanese, Chinese and Korean characters, which makes him skeptical of the reports of tsunami debris up the West Coast.<\/p>\n

Still, he said he was curiously awaiting the arrival of any floating evidence of that violent event. Mr. Baty is one of a ragtag army of unofficial seaside detectives who provide useful information on the patterns and whereabouts of ocean garbage to government officials and environmental groups. \u201cYou walk up to something on the tide line,\u201d he said, \u201cand you scratch your head and think, \u2018Now where did that come from?\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

and also http:\/\/beachcombersalert.blogspot.nl\/<\/a>
\nThank you to Maarten vanden Eynde<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/03\/13\/us\/looking-for-tsunami-debris-on-west-coast-beaches.html March 13, 2012 On West Coast, Looking for Flotsam of a Disaster By MALIA WOLLAN SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 John Anderson, a plumber by trade and a beachcomber by passion, has been trolling the shores of the Olympic Peninsula in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[32],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nishiko55.com\/eq\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1567"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nishiko55.com\/eq\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nishiko55.com\/eq\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nishiko55.com\/eq\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nishiko55.com\/eq\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1567"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/nishiko55.com\/eq\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1569,"href":"http:\/\/nishiko55.com\/eq\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1567\/revisions\/1569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nishiko55.com\/eq\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nishiko55.com\/eq\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nishiko55.com\/eq\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}