Mass death at Station M

(Picture source)

Is Fukushima killing the Pacific Ocean all the way to America's West Coast?

Michael Snyder's latest post joins the dots to create a sketch of rolling mass extinctions related to nuclear seawater contamination off eastern Japan. He leads with news of a fresh carpet of dead organisms beneath Station M in Monterey Bay, as reported by National Geographic magazine.

In turn, NG's article bases itself on a press release from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), which shows that algal blooms in 2011 and 2012 created a temporary superabundance of food for other creatures, who multiplied and then died off as the supply ran out.

MBARI says this happens periodically, and the "pulses" explain why there are more ocean floor scavengers than could be sustained by the normal amount of  nutrient "snow" drifting down from above. When explosions of "sea snot" occur, material not consumed immediately mixes into the mud and creates a reserve that is mined over succeeding years.

So, not caused by TEPCO, then.

In a way, that's a shame. For as with global warming, overenthusastic nuke-scare-mongering like Snyder's could backfire and cause the public to ignore issues that may indeed be worth worrying about.

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