Credit Jeff Chiu/Associated Press Another dead gray whale
Last week the New York Times asked the question: "What’s Killing Pacific Whales?"
Since January, at least 167 North Pacific gray whales have washed ashore dead from Mexico to Alaska.
Since January, at least 167 North Pacific gray whales have washed ashore dead from Mexico to Alaska.
That’s probably just a fraction of the number that has actually died.
Most will have sunk to the sea floor; scientists call these carcasses “whale falls.”
But the number of known deaths is high enough that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has declared an “unusual mortality event” a pronouncement that has sent scientists scrambling to figure out what’s going on, good luck with that!
You see, 167 dead North Pacific gray whales are just a tiny scratch on the surface when you consider the true devastation unravelling along a stretch of the Pacific Ocean often referred to as paradise.
The New York Times report goes on: Interdisciplinary teams of scientists have begun sifting through a profusion of data — for example, sea ice extent, ocean temperature, food availability, entanglement in fishing gear, marine pollution, toxic algae blooms, collisions with large ships and predation by killer whales.
In a sense, this is old-fashioned detective work. (Wouldn't old-fashioned detective work involve checking radiation levels?) Ok, let's not go there just yet!
Just this weekend, The Big Wobble reported, thousands of dead mussels, their shells gaping and scorched and their meats thoroughly cooked along a 150 mile stretch of northern Californian coastline.
And then In 2011 reports from scientists revealed starfish were melting, yes melting, and shellfish populations were breaking down from Alaska all the way down to Mexico. (What could melt billions of starfish I wonder?)
And rather conveniently, the New York Times has not bothered to mention the small but significant fact that along the same coastline thousands, yes, thousands of leopard sharks have mysteriously died in the San Francisco Bay area since 2017. Full story
Or the small issue of hundreds of thousands of dead seabirds which have been washing up along the coasts of western Alaska for the last three years.
Common murres, an abundant North Pacific seabird, have been found dead on shores from Shishmaref to St. Lawrence Island.
It is thought millions of the little birds have died since 2015 but the true number will never be known because the majority of birds are thought to die out at sea.
A new report now claims that the dying seabirds are now turning up as far south as San Francisco.
Not to mention of the collapse of the salmon fishing industry in Canada and Alaska, or the disappearance of Sardines, Anchovies and Tuna, causing many west coast fishermen to go bankrupt.
Also, not mentioned are the thousands of dead Puffins washing up along the Alaskan coast, stranger still, the puffins don’t startle and move away when people approach them. they poor birds just fall over onto their bellies, too weak to waddle.
Last month Bill Laughing-Bear, our friend in Alaska who is monitoring the fish up there for radiation came across one of the dead gray whales mentioned above and he claims radiation levels were higher than many of the salmon and halibut levels he had tested earlier, I personally have no reason to believe Bill would lie. Full Story
Recently other warnings have been published as the slow drip-drip-drip of information is slowly increasing.
In 2017, A study by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa revealed almost 50% of fish consumed on the islands of Hawai’i were contaminated with caesium 134 the radioactive finger-print of Fukushima.
The report also showed that migrating organisms can transport the Fukushima-signature (caesium 134) over significant distances as they showed detectable 134Cs (6.3±1.5 Bq/kg) in Pacific bluefin tuna caught off the California coast only a year after the incident.
Another study found caesium 134 in longfin tuna (Albacore) along the western coast of the US just one year after the Fukushima disaster. Full Story
Radiation levels up to 6,000 times higher than those found in the open ocean found in seafood near "CRACKED" Marshall Islands nuclear Runit Dome.
The radioactive shellfish were found near Runit Dome — a concrete-capped waste site known by locals as “The Tomb” — according to a presentation made by a U.S. Department of Energy scientist this month in Majuro, the island nation’s capital.
The clams are a popular delicacy in the Marshall Islands and in other nations, including China, which has aggressively harvested them from vast swaths of the Pacific.
According to Terry Hamilton, a veteran nuclear physicist at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Runit Dome is vulnerable to leakage by storm surge and sea level rise, and its groundwater, which is leaking into the lagoon and ocean, is severely contaminated. Full Story
No comments:
Post a Comment