Newsgroup: it.scienza.ambiente
Titolo: Oceano pacifico

  L’oceano Pacifico è morto, è svuotato di ogni vita. Ci sono solo 
rifiuti e barche per la pesca industriale intente a saccheggiare 
accuratamente quel poco che è ancora rimasto. Sta facendo il giro del 
mondo, sui media di lingua inglese, il racconto struggente, tragico e a 
suo modo poetico di un marinaio, Ivan Macfadyen (foto), che ha ripetuto 
la traversata del Pacifico effettuata dieci anni fa. Allora fra 
l’Australia e il Giappone bastava buttare la lenza per procurare pranzo 
e cena succulenti. Stavolta in tutto due sole prede.
 
Dal Giappone alla California, poi, l’oceano è diventato un deserto 
assoluto formato da acqua e rottami.
 
Nessun animale. Non un solo richiamo di uccelli marini. Solo il rumore 
del vento, delle onde e dei grossi detriti che sbattono contro la chiglia.
 
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frank ha scritto:
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Il racconto di Ivan Macfadyen, vecchio marinaio col cuore spezzato dopo 
28 giorni di desolata navigazione nel Pacifico, è stato raccolto 
dall’australiano The Newcastle Herald ed è stato variamente ripreso da 
decine e decine di testate, tutte in inglese.
  Macfadyen ha navigato con il suo equipaggio a bordo del Funnel Web 
sulla rotta Melbourne -Osaka – San Francisco. Dice di aver percorso in 
lungo e in largo gli oceani per moltissimi anni, dice di aver sempre 
visto uccelli marini che pescavano o che si posavano sulla nave per 
riposarsi e farsi trasportare. E poi delfini, squali, pesci, tartarughe… 
Stavolta nulla di tutto ciò: nulla di vivo per oltre 3.000 miglia nautiche.
  Unica apparizione, poco a Nord della Nuova Guinea, quella di una 
flotta per la pesca industriale accanto ad una barriera corallina. 
Volevano solo il tonno, tiravano e ributtavano in mare – morta – ogni 
altra creatura marina.
  E poi la parte più allucinante del viaggio, quella dal Giappone alla 
California, costantemente accompagnata dalla gran quantità di rottami 
trascinati in mare dallo tsunami del 2011, quello che ha innescato la 
crisi di Fukushima.
  Rottami, rottami grandi e piccoli ovunque: impossibile perfino 
accendere il motore. Rottami non solo in superficie ma anche sui 
fondali, come si vedeva chiaramente nelle acque cristalline delle 
Hawaii. E poi plastica, rifiuti di plastica dappertutto.
  Nel racconto di Ivan Macfadyen un solo elemento è direttamente 
riconducibile ai tre reattori nucleari in meltdown sulla costa 
giapponese: dice di aver raccolto campioni destinati ad essere esaminati 
per la radioattività e di aver compilato durante il viaggio questionari 
periodici in seguito a richieste provenienti dal mondo accademico 
statunitense.
  Però non si può non pensare a Fukushima quando Macfadyen afferma che 
nelle acque del Giappone il Funnel Web ha perso il suo colore giallo 
brillante e quando dice che uno dei pochissimi esseri viventi incontrati 
dal Giappone alla California era una balena che sembrava in fin di vita 
per un grosso tumore sul capo.
  Sui social e nei commenti sul web si fa un gran parlare della 
relazione fra Fukishima e l’assenza di esseri viventi fra Giappone e 
California.


 California.
 
Certo, come la sua invenzione. Ecco l'intervento ORIGINALE di Macfadyen:
 
http://www.theherald.com.au/story/1848433/the-ocean-is-broken/
 
 
Seguira in coda il testo (caso mai "sparisse dal sito").
Ebbene, non c'e' alcuna menzione a Fukushima.
 
La relazione tra radioattivita' e la scomparsa dei pesci, che lei sta
apparentemente (o volutamente ?) cercando di fare apparire e' contradetta
da Chernobyl. Attualmente la fauna, grazie all'assenza dell'uomo e'
prosperata. E se veramente i 3 reattori di Fukushima avessero contaminato
tutto il pescato del Pacifico, sarebbe accaduto il contrario: oggi non si
pescherebbe (ricordo che la radioattivita' e' implacabilmente rilevabile,
senza neanche aprire le confezioni (a meno che non siano di costoso
materiale schermante), il che significa che il pesce radioattivo non sarebbe
stato vendibile. E la vita nel Pacifico sarebbe rifiorita.
 
Ma c'e' un'altra cosa interessante (e questo forse molti sinceramente non
lo sanno). Dopo ogni tsunami, il pescato lungo le zone coinvolte ha un
crollo. Anche dove non c'e' stato alcuna rottura dei reattori. 2+2 = 4
Evidentemente e' la distruzione portata dallo tsunami (che non si limita
a fare strage sulla terraferma, ma a sommuovere anche i fondali ove si
trovano le aree di riproduzione di molti specie di pesci che poi sono
l'alimento per i pesci piu' grandi. Questo fa comprendere subito che il
calo del pescato riscontrato lungo la costa orientale del Giappone e'
legato direttamente allo tsunami e non alla limitata contaminazione
proveniente dai 3 reattori. Come sempre, abbiamo cibo per le bugie per
omissione. MAI che si ponga un dato o un fatto "in prospettiva".
Ove mettere in prospettiva significa verificare situazioni simili, in cui
pero' si toglie l'elemento "nucleare civile".
 
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IT was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those 
before it.
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Not the absence of sound, exactly.
 
The wind still whipped the sails and whistled in the rigging. The waves 
still sloshed against the fibreglass hull.
 
And there were plenty of other noises: muffled thuds and bumps and 
scrapes as the boat knocked against pieces of debris.
 
What was missing was the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous 
similar voyages, had surrounded the boat.
 
The birds were missing because the fish were missing.
 
Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had 
sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to 
do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw 
out a baited line.
 
"There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we 
didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice," 
Macfadyen recalled.
 
But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was 
two.
 
No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all.
 
"In years gone by I'd gotten used to all the birds and their noises," he 
said.
 
"They'd be following the boat, sometimes resting on the mast before 
taking off again. You'd see flocks of them wheeling over the surface of 
the sea in the distance, feeding on pilchards."
 
But in March and April this year, only silence and desolation surrounded 
his boat, Funnel Web, as it sped across the surface of a haunted ocean.
 
North of the equator, up above New Guinea, the ocean-racers saw a big 
fishing boat working a reef in the distance.
 
"All day it was there, trawling back and forth. It was a big ship, like a 
mother-ship," he said.
 
And all night it worked too, under bright floodlights. And in the morning 
Macfadyen was awoken by his crewman calling out, urgently, that the ship 
had launched a speedboat.
 
"Obviously I was worried. We were unarmed and pirates are a real worry in 
those waters. I thought, if these guys had weapons then we were in deep 
trouble."
 
But they weren't pirates, not in the conventional sense, at least. The 
speedboat came alongside and the Melanesian men aboard offered gifts of 
fruit and jars of jam and preserves.
 
"And they gave us five big sugar-bags full of fish," he said.
 
"They were good, big fish, of all kinds. Some were fresh, but others had 
obviously been in the sun for a while.
 
"We told them there was no way we could possibly use all those fish. 
There were just two of us, with no real place to store or keep them. They 
just shrugged and told us to tip them overboard. That's what they would 
have done with them anyway, they said.
 
"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch. 
That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was 
rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day 
and night and stripped it of every living thing."
 
Macfadyen felt sick to his heart. That was one fishing boat among 
countless more working unseen beyond the horizon, many of them doing 
exactly the same thing.
 
No wonder the sea was dead. No wonder his baited lines caught nothing. 
There was nothing to catch.
 
If that sounds depressing, it only got worse.
 
The next leg of the long voyage was from Osaka to San Francisco and for 
most of that trip the desolation was tinged with nauseous horror and a 
degree of fear.
 
"After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead," Macfadyen 
said.
 
"We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling 
helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. 
It was pretty sickening.
 
"I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing 
turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this 
time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen."
 
In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes.
 
"Part of it was the aftermath of the tsunami that hit Japan a couple of 
years ago. The wave came in over the land, picked up an unbelievable load 
of stuff and carried it out to sea. And it's still out there, everywhere 
you look."
 
Ivan's brother, Glenn, who boarded at Hawaii for the run into the United 
States, marvelled at the "thousands on thousands" of yellow plastic 
buoys. The huge tangles of synthetic rope, fishing lines and nets. Pieces 
of polystyrene foam by the million. And slicks of oil and petrol, 
everywhere.
 
Countless hundreds of wooden power poles are out there, snapped off by 
the killer wave and still trailing their wires in the middle of the sea.
 
"In years gone by, when you were becalmed by lack of wind, you'd just 
start your engine and motor on," Ivan said.
 
Not this time.
 
"In a lot of places we couldn't start our motor for fear of entangling 
the propeller in the mass of pieces of rope and cable. That's an unheard 
of situation, out in the ocean.
 
"If we did decide to motor we couldn't do it at night, only in the 
daytime with a lookout on the bow, watching for rubbish.
 
"On the bow, in the waters above Hawaii, you could see right down into 
the depths. I could see that the debris isn't just on the surface, it's 
all the way down. And it's all sizes, from a soft-drink bottle to pieces 
the size of a big car or truck.
 
"We saw a factory chimney sticking out of the water, with some kind of 
boiler thing still attached below the surface. We saw a big container-
type thing, just rolling over and over on the waves.
 
"We were weaving around these pieces of debris. It was like sailing 
through a garbage tip.
 
"Below decks you were constantly hearing things hitting against the hull, 
and you were constantly afraid of hitting something really big. As it 
was, the hull was scratched and dented all over the place from bits and 
pieces we never saw."
 
Plastic was ubiquitous. Bottles, bags and every kind of throwaway 
domestic item you can imagine, from broken chairs to dustpans, toys and 
utensils.
 
And something else. The boat's vivid yellow paint job, never faded by sun 
or sea in years gone past, reacted with something in the water off Japan, 
losing its sheen in a strange and unprecedented way.
 
BACK in Newcastle, Ivan Macfadyen is still coming to terms with the shock 
and horror of the voyage.
 
"The ocean is broken," he said, shaking his head in stunned disbelief.
 
Recognising the problem is vast, and that no organisations or governments 
appear to have a particular interest in doing anything about it, 
Macfadyen is looking for ideas.
 
He plans to lobby government ministers, hoping they might help.
 
More immediately, he will approach the organisers of Australia's major 
ocean races, trying to enlist yachties into an international scheme that 
uses volunteer yachtsmen to monitor debris and marine life.
 
Macfadyen signed up to this scheme while he was in the US, responding to 
an approach by US academics who asked yachties to fill in daily survey 
forms and collect samples for radiation testing - a significant concern 
in the wake of the tsunami and consequent nuclear power station failure 
in Japan.
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"I asked them why don't we push for a fleet to go and clean up the mess," 
he said.
 
"But they said they'd calculated that the environmental damage from 
burning the fuel to do that job would be worse than just leaving the 
debris there."
 

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Mi correggo, c'e' la frase che ho gia' commentato, che non implica nulla.
Infatti non sappiamo quali siano i valori registrati. Anzi, viene il
sospetto che fossero inconcludenti se non innocui, altrimenti ora
leggeremo "PESCI RADIOATTIVI!" ...
 
...snip...
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