Dock float washes ashore in U. S., bringing ‘ threat’ of a deadly cargo
Millions of tiny organisms native to Japan cling to debris swept from fishing port
When a tsunami hit the northern coast of Japan last year, the waves ripped four dock floats the size of freight train boxcars from their pilings in the fishing port of Misawa and turned them over to the whims of wind and currents.
One floated up on a nearby island. Two have never been seen again. And one made an incredible journey across 8,000 kilometres of ocean that ended this week on an Oregon beach.
Along for the ride were hundreds of millions of individual organisms, including a tiny species of crab, a species of algae, and a little starfish all native to Japan that have scientists worried if they get a chance to spread out on the U. S. West Coast.
“This is a very clear threat,” said John Chapman, a research scientist at Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, where the dock float washed up early Tuesday. “It’s exactly like saying you threw a bowling ball into a China shop. It’s going to break something. But will it be valuable or cheap glass? It’s incredibly difficult to predict what will happen next.”
State authorities are considering scraping all the living things off the dock and destroying them, so they would not spread, Chapman said.
While scientists expect much of the floating debris to follow the currents to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an accumulation of millions of tonnes of small bits of plastic floating in the northern Pacific, tsunami debris that can catch the wind is making its way to North America. In recent weeks a soccer ball washed up in Alaska, and a Harley- Davidson motorcycle in a shipping container in B. C.
Just how the steel and concrete dock float happened to turn up in Oregon was probably determined within sight of land in Japan, said Jan Hafner, a computer programmer in the University of Hawaii’s International Pacific Research Center, which is tracking the 1.5 million tons of tsunami debris estimated to still be floating across the Pacific.
That’s where the winds, currents and tides are most variable, due to changes in the coastline and the features of the land, even for two objects a few metres apart, he said. Once the dock float got into the ocean, it was pushed steadily by the prevailing westerly winds, and the North Pacific Current.
“If you have leaves falling from a tree ... one leaf will be moving in a slightly different direction from another one,” Hafner said. “Over time, the differences get bigger and bigger and bigger.
“Something similar is happening on the ocean.”
After it ran ashore on Tuesday, the Japanese Consulate was able to track the origin of the dock float from a plaque bolted to it commemorating its installation in June 2008. Deputy Consul Hirofumi Murabayashi said Wednesday that it was one of four that broke loose from the port of Misawa on the northern tip of the main island during the tsunami.
Akihisa Sato, an engineer with Zeniya Kaiyo Service, the dock’s Tokyo- based manufacturer, said the docks were used for loading fish onto trucks.