'The Ocean if Broken'

Sailor’s horrific Pacific journey goes viral, smashes record

Picked up by The Guardian, USA Today, many more… All fail to mention ongoing crisis at Fukushima, by far world’s largest release of radioactivity into ocean

ENENews,

23 October, 2013

The Newcastle Herald reported yesterday: “Ocean’s horror tale gets global audience" [...] The story smashed Fairfax Regional Media records, registering 620,000 unique readers on the Herald site by Tuesday afternoon. It appeared on the front page of Reddit on Monday, was trending in Melbourne early Monday afternoon, and was re-tweeted by, among others, Jack Dorsey, the founder and chief executive of Twitter [...]”

Here’s a small selection of the news outlets that published reports based on the Herald’s October 18th article ‘The ocean is broken‘:

• The Guardian: Yachtsman describes horror at ‘dead’, rubbish strewn Pacific Ocean
• USA Today: Sailor’s discovery: ‘The ocean is dead’
• Telegraph: Maritime waste: Our oceans are threatened by a toxic tide
• Salon: “It felt as if the ocean itself was dead”: One sailor’s heartbreaking voyage

None mention the ongoing nuclear crisis at Fukushima Daiichi, which is “by far the largest discharge of radioactivity into the ocean ever seen.” The Salon article even incorrectly attributes events that occurred after they left Japan for Hawaii to their trip from Australia to Japan:

[...] “all he’d had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line.” On his most recent trip, said Macfadyen, there were no fish to be found: “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.” More horrifying, even, was what he did see, en route from Japan to California: [tsunami debris] [...]

Yet, the original Newcastle Herald article specifically mentions radioactive pollution from Fukushima and includes events that deserve closer scrutiny:

• 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 forradiation testing – a significant concern in the wake of the tsunami and consequent nuclear power station failure in Japan.
  
  
• 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. [Not likely to be tsunami-related, which would have been transported far from Japan's coast by now]
  
  
• “After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead.”
  
  
• “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.”
  
  
• “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.”