5 years later, Fukushima radiation continues to seep into the Pacific Ocean

 A satellite image shows damage at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant In Fukushima Prefecture.
The damage was caused by the offshore earthquake that occurred on March 11, 2011.
Photo credit: Greenpeace

From PBS by Ken Buesseler (WHOI)

With the help of my colleagues in Japan and around the world, I’ve spent the past five years piecing together the impacts that radioactive releases from Fukushima have had on the ocean, marine life, and the people who live on both sides of the Pacific.
In the process of sharing our insights with scientists and the public, I’ve become frustrated with both sides of the nuclear power debate for embracing either overly alarmist or dismissive attitudes toward the problem.
In addition, I’ve grown concerned over the lack of oversight for radioactive contamination in U.S. waters.

 Cesium-137 in the surface oceans as of 2008 (pre-Fukushima)

In the 1960, immediately after the end of testing on the Pacific atolls, the concentration of radioactive cesium in the Pacific off the coast of Japan was about 50 Becquerels per cubic meter (Bq/m3) and 10 Bq/m3 off California.

By 2011 immediately before the earthquake and tsunami, that had fallen throughout the Pacific to about 2 Bq/m3 as a result of radioactive decay.

Today, the highest we have seen off the coast of North America is 6 Bq/m3.

Off the coast of Japan after the accident, (aside from the extremely high levels detected at the source of release from the reactors) we recorded a high of 4,500 Bq/m3.

source : whoi.edu

On March 11, 2011, the devastation in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami provided a stark lesson in nature’s power.
But in the days that followed, another disaster unfolded at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that continues to underscore how human activities can leave a discernible imprint on something as large as the Pacific Ocean and on people and organisms thousands of miles away.

 Our Radioactive Ocean: The Impacts of Fukushima on the Pacific

WHOI chemist Ken Buesseler discusses radiation in the ocean and the impacts of Fukushima across the Pacific--from Japan to North America (2014)

Five years later, the story from the Japanese side of the Pacific is this: Overall, things are under control with the construction of an “ice wall” to prevent the continued releases of contaminated water into the ocean, and fishing has resumed in all regions except those within 10 kilometers of the reactors.
However, these milestones obscure the fact that the Japanese will be wrestling with the cleanup for decades and will spend trillions of yen in the process.
It also minimizes the threats posed by millions of gallons of highly contaminated water on the power plant grounds and the likelihood that storms and other natural events will continue to mobilize contaminants currently trapped in soils and ocean sediments near shore.
More than 80 percent of the radioactivity from the damaged reactors ended up in the Pacific — far more than reached the ocean from Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. Of this, a small fraction is currently on the seafloor — the rest was swept up by the Kuroshio current, a western Pacific version of the Gulf Stream, and carried out to sea where it mixed with (and was diluted by) the vast volume of the North Pacific.
These materials, primarily two isotopes of cesium, only recently began to appear in the eastern Pacific: In 2015 we detected signs of radioactive contamination from Fukushima along the coast near British Columbia and California.

 Radioactivity In Our Ocean: Fukushima & Its Impact On The Pacific

As expected, the topic of radiation leaking into the Pacific Ocean and threatening marine life and public safety is receiving a lot of attention.

Our intent with this lecture was to bring forth the most up to date information from American and Canadian scientists that are involved in measuring the levels of radiation so the public can be more informed.

The information collected, analyzed and shared by our speakers was done scientifically.  

Levels of Fukushima cesium off the west coast of North America were measured independently by WHOI, Canada Fisheries and Kelp Watch 2015.

They all agree on levels of cesium isotopes in waters along the coast and offshore.

Although just barely discernible by our most sophisticated instruments, these signs, and the many more signs from samples we’ve collected on both sides of the Pacific, show that releases have continued, but that at current rates, it would take 5,000 years to equal the amount of cesium released in the accident’s first few months.
Despite this, the fact remains that this event is unprecedented in its total release of radioactive contamination into the ocean.
Nevertheless, we often struggle to detect signals from Fukushima above the background radiation that surrounds us every day.
So what’s the middle ground?
First, it is incorrect to say that Fukushima is under control when levels of radioactivity in the ocean indicate ongoing leaks, caused by groundwater flowing through the site and, we think, enhanced after storms.
At the same time, it is also wrong to attribute to Fukushima events like recent die-offs of seal, whale, and starfish along the West Coast rather than see that they are far more complex and have been happening for far longer than we’d like to admit.

Recently, I’ve begun to see a much more serious threat to U.S. waters.
With our nearly 100 reactors, many on the coast or near inland waterways that drain to the ocean, you might expect a federal agency to be responsible for supporting research to improve our understanding of how radioactive contamination originating from one of these sites would affect our marine resources.
Instead, the response we receive from an alphabet-soup of federal agencies is that such work “is in the national interest,” but ultimately “not our job.”
As a result, we have turned to crowd funding to help us build data along the West Coast to address immediate public concerns and to keep a watchful eye out to sea.
That is no longer sufficient.
As the EPA runs RadNet, which monitors radioactivity in the air we breathe, we need an OceanNet to do the same for our nation’s waters.
We also need to do a better job of educating the public about radioactivity to lessen the impact of both inflammatory and dismissive rhetoric.
Fortunately, accidents on the scale of Fukushima are rare, but there is a great deal more we can and should do to prepare should something similar happen here.

We can’t simply cast our lot on good fortune. Instead, we need to do everything we can to fill the knowledge gaps that have the potential to do great harm in the wake of disaster. 

Links :

• EcoWatch : 5 Years Later Fukushima Still Spilling Toxic Nuclear Waste Into Sea, Top Execs Face Criminal Charges
• NYTimes : Fukushima Keeps Fighting Radioactive Tide 5 Years After Disaster 
• Phys : Fukushima site still leaking after five years, research shows 
• GeoGraage blog : Tepco's Fukushima Daiichi disaster: four years of an ongoing nuclear crisis / Book review : Fukushima / North American scientists track incoming Fukushima plume / The ocean is broken : a Fukushima reality / Fukushima leaking radioactive water for ‘2 years, 300 tons flowing into Pacific daily’ / A silver (actually Cesium) lining: traces of Fukushima disaster fallout help scientists track tuna / Fukushima fish still contaminated from nuclear accident / What Fukushima accident did to the ocean / Fukushima nuclear fallout spread through oceans, researchers say / Scientists will track Fukushima radiation to study ocean currents /
  

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New data reveal stunning acceleration of sea level rise

This visualization shows total sea level change between 1992 and 2014, based on data collected from the TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, and Jason-2 satellites.
Blue regions are where sea level has gone down, and orange/red regions are where sea level has gone up. Since 1992, seas around the world have risen an average of nearly 3 inches.
The color range for this visualization is -7 cm to +7 cm (-2.76 inches to +2.76 inches), though measured data extends above and below 7cm(2.76 inches).
This particular range was chosen to highlight variations in sea level change.

From Scientific American by John Upton

The oceans have heaved up and down as world temperatures have waxed and waned, but as new research tracking the past 2,800 years shows, never during that time did the seas rise as sharply or as suddenly as has been the case during the last century.

The new study, the culmination of a decade of work by three teams of farflung scientists, has charted what they called an “acceleration” in sea level rise that’s triggering and worsening flooding in coastlines around the world.

The findings also warn of much worse to come.

The scientists reported in a paper published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have greater than 95 percent certainty that at least half of more than 5 inches of sea level rise they detected during the 20th century was directly caused by global warming.

“During the past millennia, sea level has never risen nearly as fast as during the last century,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a physics professor at Potsdam University in Germany, one of 10 authors of the paper.

“That was to be expected, since global warming inevitably leads to rising seas.”

By trapping heat, rising concentrations of atmospheric pollution are causing glaciers and ice sheets to melt into seas, lifting high tides ever higher.

Globally, average temperatures have risen about 1°C (nearly 2°F) since the 1800s.

Last year was the hottest recorded, easily surpassing the mark set one year earlier.

The expansion of warming ocean water was blamed in a recent study for about half of sea level rise during the past decade.

Changes in sea level vary around the world and over time, because of the effects of ocean cycles, volcanic eruptions and other phenomenon.

But the hastening pace of sea level rise is being caused by climate change.

“The new sea level data confirm once again just how unusual the age of modern global warming, due to our greenhouse gas emissions, is,” Rahmstorf said.

“They also demonstrate that one of the most dangerous impacts of global warming, namely rising seas, is well underway.”

Were it not for the effects of global warming, the researchers concluded that sea levels might actually have fallen during the 20th century.
At the very least, they would have risen far less than was actually the case.
A report published by Climate Central on Monday, the result of an analysis based in part on the findings in Monday’s paper, concluded that climate change was to blame for three quarters of the coastal floods recorded in the U.S. from 2005 to 2014, mostly high tide floods.
That was up from less than half of floods in the 1950s.
“I think this is really a first placing of human fingerprints on coastal floods, and thousands of them,” said Ben Strauss, vice president for sea level and climate impacts at Climate Central. Strauss led the analysis, which also involved government and academic researchers.
Governments and communities have been slow to respond to the crisis of rising seas, though efforts to adapt to the changes underway are now being planned around the world.

“There’s a definite recognition among people who weren’t talking about sea level rise 5 years ago that it’s something to be concerned about,” said Laura Tam, a policy director at SPUR, which is an urban planning think-tank based in San Francisco.
“And something that needs to be planned for.”
A high-profile effort to track long-term changes in sea levels was based on analysis of sediment layers at a single location in North Carolina.
Published in 2011, that study produced a chart of sea levels that bounced up and down over time, changing with global temperatures, and then ticked sharply upward as industrialization triggered global warming.
“North Carolina basically showed us that this could be done,” said Andrew Kemp, a sea level scientist at Tuft’s University.
He was a co-author of both Monday’s paper and the paper published in 2011.
Monday’s paper combined the data from North Carolina with similar analyses from 23 other locations around the world plus data from tide gauges.
Rob DeConto, a professor at UMass Amherst who researches prehistoric climates, and who was not involved with the study, described the report as a “nice job” that “used a lot more data than anybody else has used in a study like this.”
The analysis goes further than explaining historical sea level rise.
It includes worrying projections for the future.
By extending their findings to future scenarios, the scientists showed that the amount of land that could be inundated in the coming years will depend heavily on whether humanity succeeds in slashing pollution from fuel burning, deforestation and farming.
The Paris Agreement negotiated in December aims to do just that, with nations agreeing to take voluntary steps to reduce the amount of pollution they release after 2020.
It could take decades, though, before that untested approach is revealed to have been a success, a failure, or something in between.

 Coastal cities will face greater threat than anticipated

Even If humans quickly stop polluting the atmosphere, potentially keeping a global temperature rise to well below 2°C (3.8°F) compared with preindustrial times — a major goal of the Paris climate agreement — seas may still rise by an additional 9 inches to 2 feet this century, the study concluded. That would trigger serious flooding in some areas, and worsen it in others.
Under the worst-case scenario investigated, if pollution continues unabated, and if seas respond to ongoing warming by rising at the fastest rates considered likely, sea levels could rise more than 4 feet this century alone, wiping out coastal infrastructure and driving communities inland.
The problem would be made far worse if the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets collapse — something that’s difficult to forecast.
Their projections for future sea level rise were similar to those published in 2013 by scientists convened by the United Nations, following the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent assessment of climate science.
They also closely matched projections that were coincidentally published in a separate paper in the same journal on Monday.
The similarity of the other papers’ projections “strengthens the confidence” in the findings, said Robert Kopp, a Rutgers University climate scientist who led the analysis.
The convergence of the findings in Monday’s papers was a “nice result,” said Matthias Mengel, a researcher at at Potsdam University who coauthored the other sea level rise study released Monday. He led a team of sea level scientists who took a different approach than Kopp’s team to projecting future sea levels.
Mengel’s team projected future sea levels by combining the results of models that anticipate changes to icebergs, ice sheets and ocean expansion in the years ahead, and used those findings to predict sea levels.
For years, different approaches to projecting future sea level rise have arrived at different results, but the gap has recently been closing, which Mengel described as “a really good sign for sea level science” — even if it’s ominous news for humanity.

Links :

• Mashable :  Sea level is now rising at fastest rate in nearly 300 years

Canada CHS update in the GeoGarage platform

85 nautical raster charts updated

see : GeoGarage news

Offensive name on nautical chart : Negro Heads

View with the GeoGarage platform (NOAA charts)

From Old Maps blog by Dave Allen

An article in Saturday’s New York Times (Connecticut Rock Pile Known as Negro Heads May Get a New Name) described efforts to rename a small island near New Haven Connecticut.
The island, actually more of a  “rock pile”, has long been known as Negro Heads, and bears that name on the official nautical charts for Long Island Sound.

 A buoy in Long Island Sound near Branford, Conn., that marks the rock formation known as Negro Heads. 

Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times

The feature is a local landmark off the town of Branford, and has a warning buoy according to the Times story.
Here are closeup views of Branford from a 2014 nautical chart.
The rocks have been marked by buoys since at least 1846, but the name changed.

The newspaper article noted that the rock pile used to have a more offensive name, and that it was changed to the present name “between the 1830s and 1880s”.
That covers a large date range, so I looked through my collection of Coast Survey charts to see if I could find the older name and get a closer date for the name change.
I found the old name (Nigger Heads) in 1846 and the new name in 1855.
I was surprised to find the change made so early – before the Civil War.
The oldest 80,000 scale chart for the New Haven area is the 1846 chart which covers Long Island Sound  from New Haven east to the Connecticut River.
A closeup view shows that the rocks were called “Nigger Heads” at that time.

Plum Island to Stratford Shoal 1846 1:80,000

Middle Part of Long Island Sound (USCGS)

 On the 1855 map we see the name change to the current “Negro Heads”.

Plum Island to Stratford Shoal 1855 1:80,000

Middle Part of Long Island Sound (USCGS)

Before I found the evidence, I was imaging that the new name might have appeared much later in the century during the Reconstruction period.
We don’t know who made the change, or whether it was the subject of much discussion at the time. The map’s title tells us that it was published by the US Coast Survey.

 The “Sailing Directions” on each chart had the same usage.

While the official charts showed the new name from 1855 to the present, common usage may not have changed.
Note this 1903 article found online about a sailing trip along the shoreline: