Mother Jones: Japan's Radioactive Ocean

[marmar]

from Mother Jones:




It's spring in Japan's ocean waters, the time of highest primary productivity, when lengthening days reawaken the hibernating marine foodweb.



The satellite image above is from the area about 160 kilometers/100 miles north of the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant. It was shot on 21 May 2009 and shows where Japan's two mighty ocean currents—the Kuroshio and the Oyashio—collide.

The convergence zone is awesomely rich. The Oyashio flows down form the Arctic, the Kuroshio up from the subtropics. Where they meet you get all kinds of fascinating expressions of fluid dynamics—highlighted in the image above by eddies colored aquamarine by the presence of intensely blooming phytoplankton.


(Japan's ocean currents: 1. Kuroshio, 7. Oyashio. Credit: Tosaka, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Fluid dynamics drive biological dynamics too, and the phytoplankton are busting their tiny chlorophyll guts, so to speak, feasting in the collision zone—where nutrients are getting churned up from the seafloor to deliver nature's own signature blend of Miracle-Gro. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/04/japans-radio...

[CountAllVotes]

1. ...

[Junkdrawer]

2. Once again, Japan gets to be the subject of a horrible Heath Physics experiment....

[crickets]

3. Careful with that food chain, Eugene. -nt

[no_hypocrisy]

4. Can this amount of radioactivity be diluted to the point of being benign?

[Junkdrawer]

7. The big question is bioaccumulation....

Will the plankton take up the cesium? Will it concentrate as it moves up the food chain?

Hence my Health Physics experiment remark.

[dixiegrrrrl]

8. so every step you go up the food chain, the concentration of cesium gets higher."

"That's the one I am worried about," said Michael Friedlander, a U.S.-based nuclear engineer, explaining cesium might linger much longer in the ecosystem. "Plankton absorbs the cesium, the fish eat the plankton, the bigger fish eat smaller fish -- so every step you go up the food chain, the concentration of cesium gets higher."

from this article: ( about half way down)

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/31/japan.nucle...

[Hugabear]

10. I guess we'll find out, won't we

All part of the Grand Nuclear Power Experiment.

[Thunderstruck]

5. Oh no...not good. Not good at all. =(

[Urban Prairie]

6. Oh no...almost right upon "Ocean Zero" of the quake and the area of radioactive runoff...

Damn...

[Electric Monk]

9. What next?