A U.S. Coast Guard cutter unleashed cannon fire on the abandoned 164-foot Ryou-Un Maru on Thursday, ending a journey that began when last year's tsunami dislodged it and set it adrift across the Pacific Ocean.
It sank into waters more than 1,000 feet deep in the Gulf of Alaska, more than 150 miles from land.
The crew pummeled the ghost ship with high explosive ammunition and, soon after, the Ryou-Un Maru burst into flames, began to take on water and list, officials said.
The back story:
Debris from the Japanese tsunami, some of it contaminated by radioactivity, has arrived on the coast of British Columbia in the form of a ghost ship. The ship's owners have been contacted.
A fishing vessel swept out to sea off Japan in last year’s post-earthquake tsunami has been spotted about 150 nautical miles off of the islands making up Haida Gwaii territory in British Columbia.
This “ghost ship” heralds an earlier-than-anticipated arrival for the debris, which experts have been predicting to make landfall on our side of the Pacific in 2013 and ’14.
“The early indication is that things sitting higher up on the water could potentially move across the Pacific Ocean quicker than we had originally thought,” Nancy Wallace, director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Marine Debris Program, told Reuters. “Those higher-wind, quicker moving items may actually be onshore much sooner—pretty much now.”
What this portends is the fact that lighter more buoyant debris has moved faster than expected across the Pacific. Efforts to remove this waste need to begin in earnest to prevent the currents depositing the entire debris field along the Pacific coast.