Redwood Coast Tsunami Working Group

Examining the Japanese skiff that washed up near Crescent City, Calif., on April 7, 2013. This is the first verified item from the Japan tsunami to appear in California.

By Douglas Main
LiveScience

A small skiff recently washed ashore near Crescent City, Calif. But this was no ordinary ship — it floated there all the way from Japan, dislodged from its native land more than 25 months ago by a monster tsunami, government scientists have confirmed.

It's the first confirmed piece of debris to wash up in the state of California from the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The Coast Guard and local sheriff's office removed the ship after it was spotted, and staff at Humboldt State University in northwestern California helped translate the Japanese writing on the boat. Officials then traced the boat to Takata High School, located in Japan's Iwate prefecture, an area devastated by the tsunami, NOAA reported. 

The 20-foot (6 meters) skiff was covered in gooseneck barnacles, a common type of filter feeder that makes itself at home on stuff that floats in the open ocean. It wasn't immediately clear whether this boat carried invasive species, which had been seen with other pieces of Japanese tsunami debris that have washed up on the West Coast.

One ship that recently washed onto the shore in Long Beach, Wash., for example, contained an estimated 30 to 50 species of plants and animals, including potential invasive species. In a sealed compartment in the back of that ship, scientists found five live striped beakfish — “a species native to coral reefs mainly in Japanese waters (and) sometimes found in Hawaii, but certainly not in the cold waters of the Pacific Northwest coast," NOAA reported.

To date, 26 other pieces of Japanese debris have washed up in Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Alaska and British Columbia.

The tsunami dragged some 5 million tons of debris into the Pacific Ocean, according to Japanese government estimates. Much of it likely sunk shortly thereafter, but about 1.5 million tons floated away from Japan's coast, and this tsunami debris is still washing up far afield.

Email Douglas Main or follow him @Douglas_Main. Follow us @OAPlanet, Facebook or  Google+. Original article on LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

• Photos: Tsunami Debris & Trash on Hawaii's Beaches
• Tracking Japan's Tsunami Debris (Infographic)
• Images: Japanese Dock Washes Ashore in Oregon

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Kevin Head

In this photo released by NOAA, a boat lost in the Japanese tsunami of 2011 sits onshore on a remote Canadian island. The boat was discovered Aug. 9, 2012.

By Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience

Two years after a deadly tsunami swept ashore in Japan, killing more than 15,000 people, solemn reminders of the disaster are still washing ashore in Hawaii and along the Pacific coast of North America.

The tsunami debris, sometimes identifiable by serial numbers, includes boats, docks, appliance parts and fishing buoys. Though harder to trace back to a particular source, an uptick in Styrofoam and housing materials may also originate from the March 2011 wave.

"This has been a very unprecedented event," said Nancy Wallace, the director of the marine debris program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The agency has been tracking the debris, which can pose a navigation hazard to boats and an entanglement or choking hazard to wildlife. The process has given scientists a better understanding of how debris travels, Wallace told LiveScience, but no one knows how much is yet to come ashore.

"We just don't know how much debris is still floating in the water," Wallace said. "We don't know how much has sunk. What we're trying to be as focused on as possible is trying to prepare for it as best we can."

Unusual debris
So far, NOAA has confirmed 21 pieces of debris from the Japan tsunami on U.S. shores. The most recent piece, confirmed by the Consulate of Japan on Feb. 5, was a large, yellow buoy found off the Hawaiian island of Kauai. (The agency has received more than 1,000 debris reports, but many items cannot be definitively linked to the tsunami.)

Nicholas Mallos

This framed insulation measures about four feet by four feet (1.2 meters). The piece washed ashore on Ki'l Dunes Beach in Oahu after being set adrift by the Japan tsunami.

Other confirmed items that have washed up include a soccer ball in Washington state, a 35-foot (11 meters) steel tank in British Columbia and multiple small, derelict boats.

Two floating docks beached themselves in Washington and Oregon, both harboring massive amounts of marine life and requiring decontamination to prevent invasive species from establishing themselves on the U.S. coastline. [Images: Beached Japanese Dock]

Sometimes, a sudden influx of a particular item strongly suggests that it is tsunami-related, even in the absence of other evidence. Styrofoam and other housing materials, for example, have been showing up in bulk in Alaska and Hawaii, said Nicholas Mallos, an ocean debris specialist at the non-profit Ocean Conservancy.

"Styrofoam has shown up in some places in quantities 30 times historical abundances," Mallos told LiveScience.  

Tracking the debris
The debris slowly making its way across the Pacific to North America is only a fraction of the estimated 5 million tons of rubble and other materials swept into the sea by the tsunami, according to Japanese government estimates. About 70 percent of the debris sank off of Japan's coast, leaving 1.5 million tons to float across the ocean. How much of that is still floating is anybody's guess. [Tracking Tsunami Debris (Infographic)]

NOAA works with fishing vessels and commercial shippers, relying on eyewitness reports of debris in the open ocean. Early on, Wallace said, the agency tried to monitor the debris by satellite, but soon found that the material wasn't visible for very long. As the debris fields dispersed and some of it sank, the remaining pieces were too small to see from orbit.

Models of debris flow have proved more useful, though the motion of the matter depends heavily on wind and water currents. Using historical climate data, scientists can make an approximation, Wallace said, but the models were greatly improved when researchers put the real-world current and wind conditions into the system. Unfortunately, that means that while researchers are good at telling where the debris is likely located now, they're not as clear on where it's going.

"There's a large amount of uncertainty," Wallace said.

Humans dump massive amounts of debris into the ocean on a regular basis, the Ocean Conservancy's Mallos said. There are no good numbers on what percentage of the debris currently in the sea comes from the tsunami versus from everyday garbage and abandoned fishing gear. Working to reduce this everyday junk, by decreasing consumer waste, for example, will make the oceans more resilient in the face of unavoidable debris disasters like tsunamis, Mallos said.

Another thing researchers don't know: the impact of all that debris that may never reach shore.

"Very little research has been done at midwater depths, and particularly on the seafloor, as to what extent of debris abundance is there and what particular ecological impacts debris has on those marine environments," Mallos said.

Meanwhile, experts expect trickles of tsunami debris to continue to wash onto American shores for the next few years.

"Things can get caught up in eddies and gyres for a while and then get spit out, so it could really be years that the debris is out there," Wallace said. "We hope that we've seen most of it, but it's just so hard to tell."

Follow Stephanie Pappas @sipappas. Follow us on Twitter @livescience, Facebook or Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

• Photos: Tsunami Debris & Trash on Hawaii's Beaches
• Waves of Destruction: History's Biggest Tsunamis
• In Pictures: Japan Earthquake & Tsunami

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Courtesy of Analytical Graphics, Inc.

On Jan. 22, 2013, debris from a Chinese anti-satellite program test hit a Russian satellite.

By Leonard David, SpaceCom

A small Russian spacecraft in orbit appears to have been struck by Chinese space junk from a 2007 anti-satellite test, likely damaging the Russian craft, possibly severely, SPACE.com has learned.

The space collision appears to have occurred on Jan. 22, when a chunk of China's Fengyun 1C satellite, which was intentionally destroyed by that country in a 2007 anti-satellite demonstration, struck the Russian spacecraft, according to an analysis by the Center for Space Standards & Innovation (CSSI) in Colorado Springs, Colo.

CSSI technical program manager T.S. Kelso reported that the collision involved the Chinese space junk and Russia's small Ball Lens In The Space (BLITS) retroreflector satellite, a 17-pound spacecraft. The Fengyun 1C satellite debris was created during China's anti-satellite test on Jan. 11, 2007, and has posed a threat to satellites and crewed spacecraft ever since.

Evidence of the space junk collision was first reported on Feb. 4 by Russian scientists Vasiliy Yurasov and Andrey Nazarenko, both with the Institute for Precision Instrument Engineering (IPIE) in Moscow. They reported a "significant change" in the orbit of the BLITS satellite to the CSSI. [Watch the Animation: Russian Satellite Hit by Space Junk]

It is not immediately clear whether the satellite is merely wounded or completely incapacitated.

The space collision is the second substantial in-space accident between an active spacecraft and a defunct satellite or piece of space debris. In February 2009, a U.S. communications satellite was destroyed when it was hit by a defunct Russian military satellite, creating a vast debris cloud in orbit.

Tiny Russian satellite hit
The BLITS satellite is a nanosatellite consisting of two outer hemispheres made of a low-refraction-index glass, and an inner ball lens made of a high-refraction-index glass. It was launched in 2009 as a secondary payload on a Russian rocket and tracked by the International Laser Ranging Service for precision satellite laser-ranging experiments.

In addition to noticing the satellite's change in orbit, Yurasov and Nazarenko also detected changes in the spacecraft's spin velocity and attitude. [Worst Space Debris Events of All Time]

Satellite laser ranging uses short-pulse lasers and state-of-the-art optical receivers and timing electronics to measure the two-way time of flight (and hence distance) from ground stations to retroreflector arrays on Earth orbiting satellites.

On Feb. 28, the International Laser Ranging Service confirmed that the BLITS nanosatellite had collided with a piece of space debris. "As a result, an abrupt change occurred of the BLITS orbit parameters (a decrease of the orbiting period)," ILRS officials explained.

Besides this, as could be seen from SLR station photometrical observation results, the BLITS spin period had changed from 5.6 seconds before collision to 2.1 seconds after collision. The ILRS Central Bureau is based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

A change in orbits
The analysis by Russian scientists found that the orbital change on the BLITS satellite occurred on Jan. 22 at 2:57 a.m. EST (0757 GMT).

"They requested help in determining whether these changes might have been the result of a collision with another object in orbit," the CSSI's Kelso explained in a blog post on the Analytical Graphics, Inc. website, which analyzed the crash. 

Starting from the hypothesis that an object capable of causing this change in the orbit of BLITS might be large enough to be tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network, CSSI reviewed its own Satellite Orbital Conjunction Reports Assessing Threatening Encounters in Space, which is an archived database of potential space debris threats.

That review discovered only one close approach with another object, which, although it was supposed to be quite distant, occurred for the BLITS satellite on Jan. 22.

"Although the predicted distance would seem to preclude a collision, the fact that the close approach occurred within 10 seconds of the estimated change in orbit made it appear likely that this piece of Fengyun 1C debris actually collided with BLITS," Kelso wrote.

The CSSI is continuing to work with Yurasov and Nazarenko to further assess the circumstances of this likely collision.

More review needed
Kelso told SPACE.com that he is trying to address technical questions on this event, such as whether the individual masses of the pieces can be determined to assess how large a piece might have come off of the BLITS satellite.

Kelso said that the U.S. military’s Joint Space Operations Center released on March 3 the first two-line element set (TLE) — a data format used to convey sets of orbital elements that describe the orbits of Earth-orbiting satellites — for debris associated with BLITS. That information further confirms CSSI’s analysis, Kelso said.

The threat of space debris to satellites and crewed spacecraft orbiting Earth has been a growing problem. There are thought to be about 600,000 objects larger than 1 cm (0.39 inches) in diameter orbiting Earth, and at least 16,000 larger than 10 cm (3.9 inches), space debris trackers have said.

 Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is former director of research for the National Commission on Space and a past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He has written for SPACE.com since 1999. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on SPACE.com.

• Photos: Space Debris Images & Cleanup Concepts
• The Expanding Danger of Space Debris: Fragmentation
• Europe Tackles Dangerous Space Debris Problem | Video

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Nicholas Mallos

Researchers examine a buoy and refrigerator traced to the 2011 Japan tsunami. Debris like this is not normally seen in Hawaii, but the tsunami has sent a number of unusual items across the Pacific.

By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience

Oyster buoys and refrigerator parts set adrift by the 2011 Japan tsunami are now rolling in with the tide on Hawaii's beaches, a new field survey reveals.

Black oyster buoys and refrigerator parts — and even a full refrigerator — that trace back to Japan have shown up on the islands of Oahu and Kauai, said Nicholas Mallos, a conservation biologist and ocean debris specialist at the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy. Also on Oahu, researchers found a large 4-foot by 4-foot chunk of housing insulation framed in wood, a piece almost certainly sent into the sea by the devastating tsunami.

"These items have never before been seen on these beaches," Mallos told LiveScience.

The Japanese government has estimated the tsunami, which was triggered by an underwater earthquake in March 2011, swept about 5 million tons of wreckage out to sea. While 70 percent appears to have sunk offshore, the rest is floating in the Pacific Ocean. The first bit to show up in Hawaii, in September, was a barnacle-covered seafood storage bin.

Paradise of plastic
Exposed to ocean currents on every side, the Hawaiian Islands are a hotspot for Pacific junk. Some of this ocean litter originates from the fishing industry; most of the rest is consumer garbage from soda bottles, toys and other plastic goods, much broken down by the waves beyond recognition. [ In Photos: Tsunami Debris & Ocean Trash in Hawaii ]

At Kimalo Point on Hawaii's Big Island, tiny fragments of plastic penetrate as much as 3 feet below the beach surface.

"Many places on the beach, it's hard to differentiate the sand from the plastics on the surface," Mallos said.

The tsunami debris is different. For one thing, it tends to be larger, having only been in the ocean since March 2011, Mallos said. The debris also comes ashore in surprisingly homogenous waves. This summer, it was oyster buoys, Mallos said. Now, it's refrigerator parts.

The reason? Wind acts on similar objects in similar ways, according to research by Nikolai Maximenko of the University of Hawaii at Manoa's International Pacific Research Center. All of the tsunami debris went into the ocean at the same time, but some objects drift across the Pacific faster than others. That results in clusters of similar objects showing up in Hawaii and along the North American West Coast at the same time. [ Tracking Tsunami Debris (Infographic) ]

Debris hunt
Mallos and colleagues from the Japan Environmental Action Network, the Oceanic Wildlife Survey and the Japan Ministry of the Environment just completed a beach survey in Hawaii in search of this tsunami debris. They found about six or seven items, including the rusted Japanese refrigerator and buoys, which very likely came from the tsunami, Mallos said.

"We're not seeing a massive wave of debris wash onto the shore at one time, but right now, what it's been is a slow accumulation of debris here and there," he said. 

The tsunami debris is a problem, but it's part of a much bigger issue, Mallos said. Hawaii is awash with plastic trash from all over the world; the islands also neighbor the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of the North Pacific where currents push masses of plastics into a suspended gyre of trash. Long story short: The oceans are a mess.

The Hawaii survey turned up masses of this typical ocean garbage, including fishing nets and traps, Mallos said. One of the stranger items was an intact plastic trashcan from Los Angeles County with "Heal the Bay" stickers on it. Heal the Bay is a nonprofit group that works to clean up California's Santa Monica Bay. In an unfortunate irony, one of the group's trash cans got into the ocean and floated some 2,500 miles to end up on a beach in Hawaii.

"It really highlights the fact that trash travels very far," Mallos said.

The average person can do their part to reduce ocean trash, Mallos said. Because consumer plastics are a huge part of the problem, resolving to use reusable grocery bags, coffee mugs and water bottles can keep one-time use plastics out of the oceans. The Ocean Conservancy has developed a free app, called Rippl, designed to nudge users into a more ocean-friendly routine by reminding them to take those sorts of small actions.

The problem of typical ocean trash is inextricably linked to the issue of tsunami debris, Mallos said. Tsunamis aren't preventable, but regular ocean litter is, he said.

"To the extent we can keep regular forms of ocean trash out of the ocean, in the face of disasters, the ocean becomes more resilient and better equipped to deal with the debris," he said.

The new survey was funded by the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of Japan.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas or LiveScience@livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

• Waves of Destruction: History's Biggest Tsunamis
• Images: Japanese Dock Washes Ashore in Oregon
• Disasters at Sea: 6 Deadliest Shipwrecks

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