Pacific Ocean

Temperatures In The Pacific Ocean Have Shot Up To Dangerous Levels, And Scientists Are Blaming A “Strange Anomaly”

It is being called “the Pacific marine heatwave of 2019”, and officials are warning that it could have very frightening implications if it does not dissipate soon.  Right now, there is a vast expanse of water stretching from northern Alaska all the way to southern California where the water temperatures have rapidly risen to very dangerous levels.  In fact, in some spots the water temperature is already “as much as 6 degrees Fahrenheit above normal”, and there is a tremendous amount of concern about what will happen if the water continues to become even warmer.  At this point things are already so bad that we are being warned that this strange anomaly could “ravage marine life and decimate commercial fishing” all along the west coast.  The following comes from NPR…

A huge new marine heat wave has gripped the waters off the U.S. West Coast, threatening to ravage marine life and decimate commercial fishing over an expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

We are being told that this new anomaly is probably similar to another “marine heatwave” known as “the Blob” that made global headlines when it struck the region in 2014.

And if that is true, then things will definitely get very uncomfortable for marine life, but conditions will eventually go back to normal.  Although for the near future we are being warned that this anomaly is “on a trajectory to be as strong as the prior event”…

“It’s on a trajectory to be as strong as the prior event,” said Andrew Leising, a research scientist at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center. About five years ago, sea temperatures peaked at close to 7 degrees Fahrenheit above average. This year’s heat wave already is almost as large and almost as warm, with temperatures as much as 6 degrees Fahrenheit above normal over a very large area. The size and intensity of the heat wave are ominous signs of its potential danger to marine life.

But what if this new anomaly is not being caused by temporary weather patterns?

Normally, ocean temperatures take a substantial amount of time to change so dramatically, but in this case we have seen a radical change in temperatures “in just three months”…

“It went from a little bit warmer than average to about as warm as we’ve ever seen it, in just three months,” said Nate Mantua, a research scientist at Noaa’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, California.

Could it be possible that this new anomaly is being caused by something else this time around?

We don’t know, and most of the experts are assuring us that we don’t have too much to worry about, but the size of this new blob has already reached 2.5 million square miles and it continues to expand at an aggressive pace.

The weeks ahead should tell us more.  The previous “Blob” dissipated very rapidly once weather patterns shifted, and hopefully that will happen to this new anomaly.

But if ocean temperatures remain elevated or go up even higher, that could potentially be absolutely devastating for marine life along the west coast, and experts are already warning about what could happen to the salmon population…

“Ocean conditions can be stressful for the salmon, if the temperatures get really warm and their food supplies are very poor,” Mantua said. “That’s a tough combination for them, because their metabolic rates go up with higher temperatures, so their need for food increases and the food supply is going down at same time.”

And it doesn’t take that much of a temperature change to put their lives in jeopardy.  The following information comes from the Seattle Times…

Sustained water temperatures above 68 degrees Fahrenheit can stress young salmon, increase disease and keep adult salmon from reaching their spawning grounds. Water temperatures above 73 degrees can be lethal.

According to Dr. Andrew Leising, this new anomaly is already “one of the most significant events that we’ve seen”, and it just keeps getting worse.

So let’s keep a close eye on it.

To me, an image that the NOAA recently released certainly makes it look like what we are experiencing in September 2019 is significantly more severe than what we experienced in September 2014.  And if ocean temperatures continue to rise, it is inevitable that a lot of sea creatures will die.

But if this new anomaly is being caused by the exact same thing that caused “the Blob” to appear in 2014, then it could dissipate just as quickly and this will just be a relatively temporary phenomenon.

Unfortunately, we don’t know if any of that is true at this point, and there is definitely a possibility that this could be just the beginning of a truly catastrophic event.

What we do know is that we have seen bizarre weather extremes all over the world so far in 2019, and there has been a tremendous amount of global seismic activity.  We live at a time when our planet is becoming increasingly unstable, and many are extremely concerned about what is coming in the years ahead.

We get a tremendous amount of food out of the oceans, and so their stability is of paramount importance.

If ocean temperatures rise high enough, millions of fish will perish, and that will put even more stress on our increasingly strained global food supply.

So many elements of “the perfect storm” are already coming together, and this is yet another one that we can add to the list.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

Why The Melted Fuel Under Fukushima Could Poison Our Planet With Nuclear Radiation For 1000s Of Years

Nuclear Danger Sign - Public DomainSix years ago, an absolutely devastating tsunami caused a triple meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power facility.  It was the worst environmental disaster in all of human history, and even though six years have passed since that time, nobody knows where the three melted cores are.  Just recently, authorities believe that they spotted some melted fuel underneath reactor 2, but even from a distance the level of nuclear radiation that was detected was being described as “unimaginable”.  Essentially what we are talking about are three enormous “dirty bombs” that are continuously emitting tremendous amounts of nuclear radiation into the air, water and soil.  Some of the radioactive elements that are being released have half-lives that are measured in tens of thousands of years, and so the poisonous effect of these “dirty bombs” could potentially be with us for generation after generation.

Personally, I don’t know why the big mainstream news outlets in the U.S. are almost entirely ignoring Fukushima these days.  Fox News did a story on the “unimaginable” radiation at Fukushima just a few days ago, but that was about it.

To me, it is certainly newsworthy that nuclear radiation inside reactor 2 at Fukushima is at the highest level ever recorded…

Radiation levels inside a damaged reactor at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant have hit a record high, and are the worst since the plant suffered a triple meltdown nearly six years ago. The latest readings now pose a serious challenge as officials prepare to dismantle the stricken facility.

Radiation levels inside the containment vessel of reactor No. 2 at Fukushima has reached 530 sieverts per hour—a figure described by experts as “unimaginable.”

Previously, the highest level of radiation measured at Fukushima was 73 sieverts per hour, and just a small fraction of that amount would be fatal to most humans…

Needless to say, this plant is not fit for human life. Just one dose of a single sievert is enough to cause radiation sickness and nausea. Exposure to four to five sieverts would kill about half of those exposed to it within a month, while a single dose of 10 sieverts is enough to kill a person within weeks.

At 530 sieverts per hour, the radiation is so intense that even robots can only last for a couple of hours in that environment.  The Japanese hope to eventually remove the melted fuel from these reactors someday, but first they have to figure out if it is even possible.

And the truth is that the level of radiation in reactor 2 may actually be far higher than 530 sieverts per hour.  That is because the recent reading was taken “some distance from the melted fuel”…

The 530 sievert reading was recorded some distance from the melted fuel, so in reality it could be 10 times higher than recorded, said Hideyuki Ban, co-director of Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center.

Experts are also warning that the levels of radiation may be much higher than 530 sieverts per hour in reactors 1 and 3.  Nobody knows, because the melted fuel in those reactors has not even been located yet.

Even though so much time has gone by, there is still very much an urgency to this crisis.  In a newly published article, Mike Adams of Natural News explained why this is the case…

In effect, Fukushima has become the world’s largest dirty bomb, and the remaining fuel rods could explode (achieve criticality) at any moment. Even right now, the radiation is so intense that robots built to explore the wreckage can only survive for a few hours before their circuits are destroyed. Thus, there’s almost no scenario in which Japan, Tepco or anybody in the world figures out how to clean up the wreckage, reclaim the melting fuel rods and reestablish control over the nuclear reactions that are still ongoing.

You can’t even successfully build a containment vessel on top of it all because the melting nuclear fuel has already burned a massive hole in the floor and is melting its way into the ground water.

What most people don’t understand is that the melted nuclear fuel under Fukushima is going to be with us for a very, very long time.  Some of the fuel rods contained plutonium-239, and plutonium-239 has a half-life of approximately 24,000 years…

Do they think a one-meter hole magically appears in nuclear containment vessels due to random chance? No, it’s melting fuel rods, you morons. And some of that fuel is MOX fuel, which contains plutonium-239 that boasts a half life of 24,000 years. So sometime in the year 26000 A.D. the Fukushima nightmare will be HALF as toxic as it is right now. What a wonderful, progressive future to look forward to, eh?

Plutonium-239 is one of the most dangerous substances known to humanity.  As nuclear expert Steven C. Jones once explained, it would not take much plutonium-239 to kill every man, woman and child on the entire planet…

To give one an example of how lethal radiation is, one pound of plutonium evenly distributed into everyone’s lungs would kill every man, woman and child on Earth. There are literally “tons” of radioactive plutonium (among other radioactive elements) that have been released into the air and ocean environments since March 11th. Another critical fact to remember is that radioactive plutonium, for example, remains lethal (killing life) for thousands years as it has a half-life of 24,000 years. Some other radioactive elements such as uranium have a half-life of 4.47 billion years.

And remember, more radioactive material is being released from Fukushima every single day.  The following comes from an interview with Kevin Kamps, the radioactive waste monitor at Beyond Nuclear…

There are claims that “it’s all contained, don’t worry about it.” It is indisputable that there is a daily flow of radioactively contaminated groundwater into the ocean. The figures something like 80,000 gallons per day of relatively low-level radioactive waste water. Then you’ve got those storage tanks – we’re talking 800,000 tons of highly radioactive water stored in tanks. Every day they pour a hundred tons of water on each of these three melted down cores. Sometimes they lose those tanks. They leak, they overflow – it is an ongoing catastrophe.

Are you starting to understand how serious this is?

Once nuclear material escapes from Fukushima, it literally gets distributed all over the planet.

That means that it is getting into our air, our water and our food supply.

And I find it extremely interesting that the EPA was moving to dramatically raise the “safe limits” on radioactivity in our drinking water right at the end of the Obama administration.  The following comes from a Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility press release dated December 22, 2016…

“Following Japan’s Fukushima meltdown in 2011, EPA’s claims that no radioactivity could reach the U.S. at levels of concern were contradicted by its own rainwater measurements showing contamination from Fukushima throughout the U.S. well above Safe Drinking Water Act limits. In reaction, EPA prepared new limits 1000s of times higher than even the Fukushima rainwater because ‘EPA experienced major difficulties conveying to the public that the detected levels…were not of immediate concern for public health.’”

Why in the world would the EPA do that?

Here are some more of the details…

The documents obtained by PEER revealed that the EPA plans to raise maximum allowable limits of iodine-131, cobalt-60 and calcium-45 to more than 10,000 times the levels allowed under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Others would be hundreds or thousands of times higher under the new guidelines.

The agency’s justification for withholding the new proposed limits from the public until after the proposal had been adopted was that it wanted to “avoid confusion.”

Radioactive material is also getting into our food supply.  If you love to eat fish this next item may be a bummer, because it is being reported that radiation from Fukushima was recently found in salmon off the coast of Oregon…

Fish contaminated by radiation from the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan have been detected 6,000 miles away of the US west coast.

Salmon carrying traces of caesium 134 particles – the so-called fingerprint of the Fukushima – were found by researchers in the seas off Oregon.

One we eat something that has been contaminated, radioactive material will often migrate to key organs in our body, and once it is there it can poison us indefinitely.  In a previous article I included a quote from author Helen Caldicott, the author of “Crisis Without End: The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe“.  I am including the quote once again in this article because it is absolutely imperative that we all understand the danger that we are facing…

Internal radiation, on the other hand, emanates from radioactive elements which enter the body by inhalation, ingestion, or skin absorption. Hazardous radionuclides such as iodine-131, caesium 137, and other isotopes currently being released in the sea and air around Fukushima bio-concentrate at each step of various food chains (for example into algae, crustaceans, small fish, bigger fish, then humans; or soil, grass, cow’s meat and milk, then humans). After they enter the body, these elements – called internal emitters – migrate to specific organs such as the thyroid, liver, bone, and brain, where they continuously irradiate small volumes of cells with high doses of alpha, beta and/or gamma radiation, and over many years, can induce uncontrolled cell replication – that is, cancer. Further, many of the nuclides remain radioactive in the environment for generations, and ultimately will cause increased incidences of cancer and genetic diseases over time.

The amount of cesium-137 that has been released at Fukushima is equivalent to hundreds of Hiroshima bombs.

But because we can’t see, touch, taste or hear the danger, to many people it may not seem real.

Nuclear radiation is a silent killer, and unless a miracle happens the consequences of the Fukushima nuclear disaster will be felt for generations to come.