A Broken Ocean?

This Aussie sailor claims to have sailed thousands of miles of ocean without seeing any signs of life in it. He says that much of the world's waterway is one vast pot of pollution. I may never get the chance to see what he has seen, so must accept the veracity of his own testimony, but it rings true with pieces of information I have heard from other sources, this notion that the ocean is now broken.

Here on the Monterey Bay we do not seem to have a shortage of marine life, but rather a preponderance of it. More whales, dolphins, seals, and elephant seals have been seen this year than what is considered usual. From shore I can see a few spouts pretty regularly, as well as watch great schools of dolphin slide over the surface of the blue-green water ever so effortlessly. The bay seems to be a feeding ground for many great creatures, and this year the food supply is as good as ever.

Just the other day I took one of my Christmas visitors out for a walk on the Capitola Wharf, which extends out into the ocean a few hundred yards. We parked close by because he has a handicap parking pass, and stepped out only a few feet on to the wharf to witness three boys pulling anchovies out of the water like nobody's business. When we leaned over and studied the surface of the water, we could see a dark cloud swirling around the wharf pilings some fifteen or twenty feet below us. The cloud was a massive swarm of these tiny black-backed, silver-bellied little fish that give life to the higher food chain. Several seals and ducks were swimming up underneath the schools and causing them to dart and swirl in many directions all at once to avoid being eaten.

I have heard of these great schools, but this was the first of them that I have seen up close. Ever since the Steinbeck era, when the sardine population was overfished and never returned, I had come to expect that the same would hold for other species of fish as well. The sardines have not come back, but anchovies, squid, and I imagine several other common species are living quite nicely in huge numbers here. All this going on only ten yards from shore, so what other greater activity might be going on a mile or two out?

The wide stretches of open sea perhaps change from year to year in how much marine life is supported. The Aussie, however, also reported seeing massive trash accumulations--primarily plastic--floating about on the surface as though they were islands, out in the middle of nowhere. We have not seen that on the Monterey Bay. Nor have we seen any of the Fukushima junk that is also spread across the ocean between California and Japan. He reports whole telephone poles bobbing around in the open sea, with cable and wire keeping them tied together, so that a boat can easily become ensnared in trap-like conditions.

What we are seeing this week, however, appearing on beaches on the central California coast, is extra large dosages of radiation, some as much as 1400% above normal. Amateur inspectors armed with Geiger counters have been monitoring the coast ever since the great Fukushima quake and nuclear plant melt down, and this week there have been a flurry of new reports coming to the media that claim this new increase. By the time any government agency can step in and verify that the Fukushima radiation has indeed spread this far and is dangerous, I fear that we will all be contaminated.

I don't know if we have broken our mother ocean or not. I suspect the news concerning the spread of radioactivity is serious and perilous to our health and well-being, but is perhaps reversible, if we can detect it, and take plans to remove it while protecting ourselves. Coastal dwellers reading of these reports must be wondering if it is safe to go near or in the water, and whether seafood should be eliminated from our diet. The Japanese government and the big utility company, TEPCO, that managed the Fukushima plants, have already lost credibility with the public by denying the extent and severity of damage to the reactors, so here we sit on the other edge of this big body of water, wondering what is to be believed, and what is simply fear-mongering on the part of a few pseudo-authorities.