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Studying Fukushima's Impacts |
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| | 1. Twenty-five years ago today, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded and burned, creating what was at the time the largest accidental release of radiation to the environment. Ken Buesseler was at the time a young MIT/WHOI Joint Program student in marine chemistry studying radiation in the North Atlantic from Cold War-era nuclear weapons testing. He and his colleagues immediately began tracking the fate of fallout from Chernobyl in the Black Sea. Although radiation levels there remain higher than most other ocean basins, the Black Sea is safe for swimming and fishing. Today, Buesseler finds himself monitoring releases from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in northern Japan that was damaged following the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami. (Illustration by Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 2. WHOI marine chemist Ken Buesseler pays his respects in front of Namiwake Jinja. The shrine marked safe ground after the Jogan tsunami of 869 A.D. (Namiwake roughly translates as “split wave.”) It is a reminder that Japan has a history of devastaing tsunamis that needs to be considered when deciding how to protect the coast. (Ken Kostel, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 3. Stony Brook University marine biologist Hannes Baumann holds a hatchetfish brought to the surface in a net trawl off the northeast coast of Japan in June. Baumann and 16 other physical, chemical, and biological oceanographers took part in a two-week cruise organized by WHOI's Ken Buesseler to study the fate and impact of radiation released from the nuclear power plant at Fukushima after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. One of the questions the cruise hopes to resolve is whether radioactive isotopes are being passed up the food chain. Hatchetfish live in the deep ocean and migrate at night to the surface to feed on plankton and small fish. In turn, they also become prey for larger fish (Photo by Ken Kostel, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 4. Marine chemist Ken Buesseler (left) and University of Hawaii technician Paul Balch make a final inspection of a rosette sampler prior to deploying the instrument. Buesseler organized the cruise aboard the R/V Ka'imikai-O-Kanaloa to trace the path of radiation released from the tsunami-battered nuclear reactor in Fukushima, Japan. The group of 17 physical, chemical, and biological oceanographers on board spent two weeks in June taking water, air, and biological samples in an effort to understand the fate and impacts of radiation in the northwest Pacific. (Photo by Ken Kostel, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 5. Marine biologist Hannes Baumann (far right) from State University of New York (SUNY) Stony Brook prepares to get a line on a Methot net from the stern of the research vessel Ka'imikai-o-Kanaloa off the northeast coast of Japan in June 2011. Baumann and others were on board the cruise organized by WHOI's Ken Buesseler to study the spread, fate, and impacts of radiation released from the damaged nuclear power plant at Fukushima. The net was tailored to capture small fish and large plankton (nekton) that are one step on the food chain above phytoplankton and the smallest marine animals and that are, in turn, eaten by larger fish. (Photo by Ken Kostel, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 6. Crystal Breier, Kamila Stastna, Ken Buesseler, and Sachiko Yoshida (left to right) draw water from a rosette sampler in June 2011 on board the R/V Ka'imikai-o-Kanaloa. The cruise was organized by Buesseler, a marine chemist at WHOI, to track radiation released from the nuclear power plants in Japan after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami severely damaged its cooling and emergency systems. As a graduate student, Buesseler got his start in oceanography studying the spread of radiation from the accident at Chernobyl (pdf) in the Black Sea. (Photo by Ken Kostel, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | Last updated: July 6, 2012 |
