Deep Sea Creatures Washing Ashore

[Deepwater6]

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2013/10/18/newday-wian-sea-creatures-california.cnn.html

 

Well Hy-Pogs what do you think? It's a long stretch, but could these creatures washing ashore tell us something is changing down deep or is it just a coincidence? Is there a possibility this is a precursor to an earthquake? Could it be there are copious amounts of venting occurring down deep? Have water temperatures down there drastically shifted?

[CraigD]

It's a long stretch, but could these creatures washing ashore tell us something is changing down deep or is it just a coincidence?

Though I joked about an “oarfish dieoff” when I heard of a second very rare oarfish carcass being found about 50 miles from the first one off Santa Catalina island, CA, I don’t think (and dearly hope) they aren’t the result of a widespread habitat catastrophe.

 

Despite their great size (there are old published lengths of 11 m, unconfirmed reports of 15 m, while the recent finds are respectable 5.5 and 4.3 m ones), oarfish are very weak swimmers, so the leading hypothesis on how these two died is that they got caught in currents that brought them too near shore, so were unable to feed, and/or were battered by waves against the sea floor.

 

Is there a possibility this is a precursor to an earthquake? Could it be there are copious amounts of venting occurring down deep? Have water temperatures down there drastically shifted?

I doubt the oarfish died deep in the ocean, as then their carcasses would have stayed there, not wound up ashore or near shore. I think this pretty much rules out these scenarios.

 

Perhaps ocean currents have changed in some subtle way, causing deep sea fish to stray into shallow water. If so, I'd expect to see more finds like these 2 oarfish.

[SaxonViolence]

I'd been following this story and wondering about what, if anything, it portends myself.

 

Saxon Violence

[Racoon]

Fukishima radiation in the Pacific, LionFish in the Atlantic..Asian Carp in the Mississippi

 

If somebody **** in your livingroom and you had to sleep and eat next to it, I would guess that you'd say something is kinda' wrong with that..

 

:rolleyes:

[Deepwater6]

Fukishima radiation in the Pacific, LionFish in the Atlantic..Asian Carp in the Mississippi

 

If somebody **** in your livingroom and you had to sleep and eat next to it, I would guess that you'd say something is kinda' wrong with that..

 

:rolleyes:

 

 

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/national_world&id=9300844

 

Yes I would, I thought I read another recent article about a new (brief) small leak from the Fukishima plant. I looked at a few news sites but couldn't find it again. Either way I think this problem was and more importantly is a lot worse than some people understand. In addition I believe the media doesn't paint the headlines with it anymore. It's an old story and so many bad things have happened that the public is largely indifferent to any more news coming out of the scene. But the plant is far from fixed. There is a lot of dangerous work to be done to make that happen.

[CraigD]

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/national_world&id=9300844

What surprised me in this article is the mention that “All but two of Japan's 50 nuclear reactors” – not just the ones at Fukushima - “have been offline since a March 2011”. Based on this and this wikipedia articles, this suggests that Japan has lost 20-30% of its electric power supply, so must be making up for it with non-nuclear sources. I suspect this is not a good thing, economically or environmentally.

 

Yes I would, I thought I read another recent article about a new (brief) small leak from the Fukishima plant. I looked at a few news sites but couldn't find it again.

The Wikipedia article Timeline of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster is a pretty good, up-to-date collection of summaries and links to news articles on the continuing Fukushima Daiichi disaster.

 

In short, efforts to seal the effectively ruined reactors off from the environment are not going well. An estimated 300,000 kg per day of highly contaminated (estimated )water is leaking into the Pacific. This is reminiscent of the radiation dumped into the US’s Columbia river from the 1940s through the early ‘70s from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Fortunately for people living in Japan, none of them are “downriver” from the Pacific ocean, so nobody’s getting much dosed by this leak, as shown by measurements of radiation in the urine of children living near the ruined reactor (see the “radiation detected in Fukushima children’s urine” section of this paper)

 

As best I can tell, the most important reason that the leak at Fukushima Daiichi must be stopped (which actually means much reduced, as I don’t believe there’s any way to completely stop it that wouldn’t risk worse environment damage) is the safety of people near it, especially the many people who must actually go onto the reactor grounds daily, and will for decades to come, to assure that nothing more is going wrong. According to this article, the Japanese government has lost faith in the ability of Fukushima’s private operators to manage the site, and is taking over the project.

 

This

Either way I think this problem was and more importantly is a lot worse than some people understand.

I’ve struggled to make sense of how bad the Fukishima contamination really is. Some people react to the mere words “nuclear” and “radiation” as a pronouncement of certain death and disaster, and loudly express this belief. Others assume that, because 2.5 years have passed and major TV news rarely mentions it, the problem is taken care of.

 

My study has led me to agree with the conclusions of articles like this one, which note that the total yearly radiation of the continuing Fukushima leak is about half that contained in the bananas eaten by people each year. Since people don’t drink the entire ocean each year, the dose gotten is much lower than that from eating bananas.

 

 

Fukishima radiation in the Pacific, LionFish in the Atlantic..Asian Carp in the Mississippi

I don’t know of any connection between these 3 things, Racoon, of between them and this thread’s original subject of deep sea creatures washing ashore. What’s you’re point in putting them all together in one sorta sentence?

 

If somebody **** in your livingroom and you had to sleep and eat next to it, I would guess that you'd say something is kinda' wrong with that..

Though I know you intend this as a metaphor, I don’t think it’s a very apt one. High level nuclear waste is not much like ****. And if someone **** in my living room, I’d say something’s more than kinda’ wrong, and certainly would not have to sleep or eat next to it – I’d kick whoever did it out, clean up the mess, and likely never let them in again!

 

Oddly, I’m little offended that sizable herds of people tromp though all manner of **** and worse outside, then tromp though my home wearing the same shoes with little more than a short scuffing on a rubber welcome mat. We Americans, unlike the Japanese, don’t have a near universal “shoes off at the door” tradition.

[JMJones0424]

Here's a video (transcript available) of an interview with one of the biologists that necropsied one of the oarfish:

 

http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/podcasts/2013/10/oarfish.html#.UmwGQVNGasj

 

Russ Vetter: So without any evidence, and I’ll stress that, it seems reasonable to me based on the freshness of the fish that it must have stranded or died fairly close to where it eventually washed up. So if you see the videos of the fish and you see what poor swimmers they are perhaps an ocean current swum in and brought some more oceanic water close to the beach. That would be what I would say would be a working hypothesis, some place you would start.

[Gregb]

Here's a video (transcript available) of an interview with one of the biologists that necropsied one of the oarfish:

 

http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/podcasts/2013/10/oarfish.html#.UmwGQVNGasj

 

Deep sea creatures are so nasty! However ugly the monk fish is, it's dang tasty!