On March 11, 2011 at approximately 5:35 pm, an earthquake struck the northeast coast of Japan measuring a magnitude of 9.0 on the Richter scale. Following that massive earthquake was second and even more destructive force, a tsunami causing massive and irremediable damage to the nuclear reactors of a nuclear power plant called Fukushima, which released harmful radiation elements and substances into the environment.
The tsunami devastated Aomori an area located about 30 miles east of City of Tokyo. The devastating and far reaching results of this earthquake and tsunami included: * Approximately 20,000 people were killed * Approximately 750,000 homes were destroyed and vanished * The industrial facilities of this region which were extensive and included production plants for the steel industry, consumer electronics, automotive industrial parks, and petrochemicals plants * And arguably the most long term devastation came from the leakage of nuclear material from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plan
The International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) ranked the disaster of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant at a level 7. This was the same rating the agency gave to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
The release of the radioactive material, waste products, and chemicals included vast amounts of hydrochloric acid, chromium, and ammonia tanks.
Effects on Agriculture and Stock Animals
The Japanese Pharmaceutical and Food Safety Bureau released their report that documented manufacturing facilities suffered extreme tsunami damage. There were reports that entire industry sized containers of toxic or hazardous substances or even entire storage facilities were completed washed away and have never been located or recovered thus confirming that they were completely dispersed into the environment.
Known carcinogenic materials such as asbestos, benzene, bromomethane, cadmium, chromium compounds, chloroform, chlorodifluoromethane, formaldehyde, lead, mercury, toluene, and xylene were all released in unknown quantities and mixtures which will cause continued death for wildlife and plants in that region for decades. Compounding the impact is that many of these chemicals do not break down easily in nature and therefore will contaminate the local soil and water resources for many years. This has a potential to leak into the food chain back to human beings and cause numerous issues in the population from cancer, sterilization, and birth defects.
The tsunami caused extensive devastation to agricultural lands and their facilities in rural communities such as Aomori, Chiba, Fukushima, Iwate, Ibaraki, Miyagi, which are known for production of pigs and cattle for the human food chain were raised alongside the regional crops that included a variety of vegetables and grains.
Scientists know that the tsunami wave occurred before farmers started planting the crops for the season, however pesticides in those regions were stockpiled in those exact areas devastated by flooding. Not only are the pesticides toxic to the wildlife and plant systems, but the fertilizer and livestock feed additives that were also stored in high concentrations would also present a potential contamination hazard not only to soil, but to the groundwater, and ultimately to people encountering post-tsunami mixture of debris and soil.
Effects on the marine ecology from radiation exposure
One of the effects of the tsunami striking where it did was the release of radioactive contamination into the Pacific Ocean. This has caused a great concern for the effects on the seafood supply chain in and round the area.
The plethora of dead and decaying plant and animal life created a situation that caused zooplankton to flourish which in turn created ideal conditions for small fish to feed. With the increase in smaller bait fist, Japan saw a rise in fish normal farmed for food for human populations. The increase in fish and lack of boats in the water also increased the dolphin population.
Other effects of the tsunami included the change in the topography of the sea floor itself. The erosion of the seafloor sediments and can devastate the sea bottom ecosystems. In these areas are small invertebrates like sea worms, crustaceans and sea snails that burrow through sea floor sediments and mix them digesting as they move. If these creatures are wiped out, it can leave a large portion of the bottom of the sea without a basic form of life which other higher level life need to survive.
One of the catastrophic consequences of this disaster was a phenomenon called Species Displacement. Tsunamis can carry massive amounts of debris from one side of the ocean to another. In the Tohoku Tsunami, a concrete block from Misawa, Japan crossed the Pacific Ocean in fifteen months, and arrived on the Oregon coast. Plant and animal life had adhered to the block, causing algae and these other organisms to successfully survived the ocean crossing. These species have the possibility to now establish new colonies in Oregon and potentially displace native species located there.