Just for Practice-After two years of Japan Tsunami, Waves of Debris from Japan are killing wildlife

Chuang, Che-Kuang

Two years ago, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck off japan and caused enormous damage. A huge tsunami gorged the entire northeastern coastline of Fukushima, at the same time the destructive power of the shock wave caused the worst nuclear crisis in the past 25 years, except the Chernobyl crisis. Two years later, the destruction of the Fukushima earthquake was not end. The debris from Japan traveled all around the world and caused serious environment problem.

In Kamilo Beach, one remote coast of Hawaii, here is all full with the debris, litters and trashes from Fukushima, covered the entire coastline. Since fall 2011, the amount of the debris from japan kept increasing with an incredible speed, such like refrigerators, large buoys, even an intact fish boat slum this beach and seriously damage the original landscape and beautiful scenery. Over 1.5 billion ton of floating debris caused by the tsunami now makes the already big problem of marine debris much worse.

And it is not only about the problem of trashes. This dirty debris now seriously threatens wildlife, especially birds and fishes. According to the research of Professor David Hyrenbach from Hawaii Pacific University, about 80 percent of seabirds’ stomachs are full with these indigestible plastic litters because they confused it for food. Not only the adult birds, but also the baby birds suffered of the debris. Almost every bird the research team found had some sort of plastic inside their bodies, including some large ones like plastic toys and small one as the debris of plastic bags.

Lots of fishes also became the victims of this environment crisis. Some edible fishes’ stomachs, including yellow fin tuna, big eye fish and lancet fish which might become one of the dish in your table, are all stuffed with some mysterious black debris-it might be some kind of sea grass, or just a black garbage bag. The worst thing is that people still do not know if there are any chemicals absorbed into these fishes’ bodies. If they do so, it may cause terrible damage to consumers, including mankind.

From now there are few things that the environmental activists can do about this severe crisis. They can do nothing but only clean the beach and coast. But there is something the consumers can do to change this situation- simply just use less plastic products.

Information resource:CNN.