Almost One Year Later

Curt Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer and expert on marine currents, drift patterns and beachcombing, said the leading edge of a debris field from last year’s killer tsunami should begin arriving in October. “I think there will be bones in sneakers washing up over the years,” said Ebbesmeyer, who spoke at a symposium on the subject earlier this week in Washington state. “There are still 3,000 people missing from the tsunami, so these may be the last remains that a family has,” he said.

Debris swept across the Pacific could wash ashore anywhere from northern California to Alaska. “Bones and sneakers can float for years, so I expect them to wash ashore,” Ebbesmeyer said. “I expect the main mass of debris to start arriving in October, so I would guess later this year, and for the next several years.” He urged beachcombers to be on the lookout — but urged them to contact police with any finds so the authorities can follow up through the proper channels, if necessary through Japanese consulates.

Ebbesmeyer said he had briefed Japanese consular officials in Seattle. “They only really want to deal with police and medical examiners ... You don’t want to contact a family with any false expectations,” he said. “Imagine if you lost your whole family over there, and a sneaker washed up with bones that were traced to, say, your mother, what would you do? You’d probably get right on an airplane and go over,” he said. “It’s a very delicate subject, and one the authorities need to handle with care,” said the expert, founder of the Beachcombers’ and Oceanographers’ International Association.

Millions of tonnes of debris are expected to wash up in the coming months and years from the Japanese quake. Researchers in Hawaii have developed computer models to forecast where and when it could come ashore. In early April, the US Coast Guard sunk a deserted Japanese trawler that had appeared off the coast of Alaska more than a year after being set adrift by the tsunami.

Japan tsunami bones to wash up in US: expert - Taipei Times

Biologists are equally worried about the threat from invasive species attached to the debris. How big a threat remains to be seen. They fear that foreign species that arrive on our shores — crabs, barnacles, starfish, snails and plants — could establish a foothold and crowd out native creatures and plants. There's precedent for the concerns: The European green crab wrecked the soft-shell clam industry in New England and Nova Scotia in the 1950s. Zebra and quagga mussels clog water intake pipes, filtration and electric power plants across the Midwest to the tune of $1 billion in annual cleanup costs. Shipworms, small-shelled clams that burrow into wood, established themselves in San Francisco Bay. They bore into piers, docks and boats and cause $200 million in yearly damage.

So concern over the 66-foot-long concrete and plastic foam dock that landed on a beach near Newport, Ore., last week, makes sense. The dock carried dozens of foreign species, which surprised researchers by surviving more than 15 months of travel across the deep ocean. Oregon park officials rounded up 1.5 tons of marine life critters aboard the dock and buried them in an 8-foot-deep hole above the high-tide mark Thursday. They are weighing bids to demolish the structure in place or tow it out to sea for disposal. "The dock is just the tip of the iceberg, but we don't know how big an iceberg," says marine invasive species expert James Carlton of Williams College maritime studies program at the Mystic (Conn.) Seaport. Most of the debris washed offshore in the tsunami sank, according to Japanese estimates, but roughly 1.5 million tons of it remains afloat in the Pacific. "The tsunami was without precedent, so we are bound to get some more surprises," Carlton says.

Sparked by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake, the tsunami and subsequent waves that then retreated to the sea trapped debris in Pacific currents, says Keeley Belva of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Part of the problem has been identifying what debris truly comes from Japan and what is the sort of trash — a gum wrapper — that might have fallen from a boat. We need solid identification." Though cargo ships constantly arrive at West Coast ports from Japan, they don't pose the invasive species threat that a dock trailing oysters, algae and other creatures does, says marine ecologist James Morris of the NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science in Beaufort, N.C. "Attempts are made to prevent hitchhikers in the shipping trade," Morris says, such as scraping barnacles off hulls or dumping contaminated ballast water at sea. Trash from cargo ships that regularly washes ashore is covered with deep-sea organisms, which, unlike species attached to the tsunami debris, are unlikely to survive in coastal bays and harbors.

San Francisco Bay has become a hot spot for hundreds of invasive pests, from Japanese goby fish to Black Sea jellyfish. A 2005 Cornell University report put the damage cost of invasive aquatic species at more than $6.6 billion a year, everything from carp that worsen water quality by eating plants that clean the water and stirring up mud to crabs that prey on oyster farms. "Many times, the effects of invasive species are not realized until many years after their introduction," when they have reproduced many times over, Morris says. The real danger comes from Japanese debris bearing invasive crabs or other species drifting into a harbor or Puget Sound's salt marshes where they may gain a foothold, Carlton says. "We may have gotten lucky," he says. "That isn't a location where the harbor species on the dock can survive." On the other hand, he says, "more is coming."

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What's sad is you compare the devestation in Japan with what occured in Haiti. And then you look at how far Japan has recovered and how Haiti hasn't.....makes you wonder why we should even try to help Haiti and countries like it.