Eco disaster at Kamchatka peninsula with mass death of sea animals

https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/eco-disaster-at-kamchatka-peninsula-with-mass-death-of-sea-animals-at-precious-pacific-beach/

by ignasl • 6 years ago

286 55 6 years ago

siberiantimes.com

dmos622• 6 years ago

Terrible. It's so upsetting to realise how easily we can (and do) destroy ecosystems.

trhway• 6 years ago

to realise how easily we can (and do) destroy ecosystems.

when you are in Russia, especially outside of large cities, especially toward the East or North, the vastness of your surroundings doesn't let you feel that you can do anything that will make any sizable imprint on the surroundings, and that feeling has been ingrained into the psyche for generations (it also correlates, with some philosophers claiming a cause here, with the Russian approach to politics in particular and the whole worldview in general :). As result you do everything you need or want without thinking of consequences, kind of like a puppy behavior toward large dog (the issue of course is that the "puppy" has long since grown up and possesses a large nuclear and chemical industries among the other things) .

eloff8• 6 years ago

Looks like that military base dumped something yellow and very toxic into the river (or some other organization, but we only hear of the military base being in the area).

I wonder what kind of chemicals fit that profile?

It's nice to live in a country where doing that means lawsuits and jail time usually. I doubt there will be justice in this case.

minerjoe• 6 years ago

What country do you live in? In mine, the good ol' USA, captured regulators just make it all legal. See fracking, for example.

ed25519FUUU• 6 years ago

It’s legal to dump industrial diesel into rivers in the USA?

eloff8• 6 years ago

Yet the waterways in the USA have never been cleaner in the last hundred years. There are regulations and they are enforced, imperfectly like everything.

I live in Canada where we take the environment more seriously still.

pvaldes• 6 years ago

Just mud can have the same effect. In any case the effect on eyes and the smell would discard a mud flood (probably).

You don't need a toxic to kill lots of animals.

tandav• 6 years ago

related: there was another large poison spill in russia this year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norilsk_oil_spill

pvg3• 6 years ago

Norilsk is over 3500 km from Kamchatka.

kingofpandora• 6 years ago

Probably why the commenter said there was another oil spill in Russia.

dredmorbius2• 6 years ago

Kamchatka isalso home to a great deal of volcanic and geothermal activity. The cause here might not be human.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KILQ0M5ilIo

pierrec• 6 years ago

It's always worth raising this possibility, though it looks really unlikely in this case. Volcanic and geothermal activity has never released toxic phenols as far as I can tell. Instead you get simpler compounds like carbon dioxide, sulfate, etc. which can also be deadly but only at higher concentrations. This appears to keep killing after dilution.

dredmorbius2• 6 years ago

Fair enough. I saw yellow and though "hrm, sulfur?"

Unless a geothermal event were cutting through and releasing a natural hydrocarbon field (it's happened: Permian–Triassic mass extinction event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_...), organic chemicals would be unlikely.

My understanding is that Kamkatchka is too young geologically, as well as otherwise unsuitable, for there to be large petrochemical reserves.

patfla• 6 years ago

It seems that's the same bay as for Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, which with a population of 180,000 is Kamchatska's largest city. So this is very close to what amounts to a large population for Kamchatka.

The Russians have always been cavalier about pollution and, as much as it may be hard to believe for some Americans, even more cavalier than here in the US. Not the Russian people of course but their political systems whether Communist or post-Communist. Corruption, lack of accountability and so on. Then obviously Siberia is very large and very sparsely population and interested parties might think: big mess? No big deal.

Sort of like the intermontane west generally in the US. Wasteland, right?

Gibbon1• 6 years ago

Sort of like the intermontane west generally in the US. Wasteland, right?

Well the western US is generally considered to be a delicate arid ecosystems that is really easy to mess up permanently. A lot of it was really messed up from timber cutting, mining, and cattle ranching in the 1800's.

And it only looks like it's recovered because no one remembers what it was like before. There is a valley where the Mormons found a rich verdant prairie. And of course they plowed it under and grew the best crop of wheat they ever saw. And the next winter the winds blew the topsoil away.

redisman• 6 years ago

The native prairie biome has pretty much been completely eradicated in the US. Pretty impressive for what once dominated the land from Wisconsin to Montana

throwawaysea• 6 years ago

Timber cutting also destroyed the majority of old growth trees, causing high densities of smaller and younger trees to grow in their place. Today we often think of forests being healthy when we see dense uninterrupted lush green trees. However forests in the western US were sparser previously, with regular wildfires thinning younger trees, sparing older/tougher trees, modulating forest density, and altering the mix of undergrowth/young trees/old growth. There are videos on YouTube showing comparisons of forests from 100 years ago and today, and they look very different as a result of these changes.

yread• 6 years ago

It's not surprising considering the way they handled the military nuclear accident last year:

https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/security/2019/10/wreak-bar...

cozzyd2• 6 years ago

I tried to generate a "story" using Planet imagery: https://www.planet.com/stories/kamtchatka-eco-disaster-4zV9_... The imagery from May 22 seems especially suspicious. Unfortunately there are some large gaps of images available (at least to me!)

edit: apparently I had too many filters on. Here's one with slightly more imagery: https://www.planet.com/stories/more-kamchatka-eco-disater-fr...

A few thoughts: seems to coincide with snowmelt... could be anything in the catchment area. Also, this is a volanic region so there's some possibility that there is some natural deposition of sulfuric acid. The latter also makes for great plausible deniability of course...

rckt• 6 years ago

There's Kozelsky pesticides landfill in the area. It was started there circa 1980, 35 km to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. There were 108 tons of unusable pesticides. The spill comes from the river Nalycheva, and the landfill is on the river Mutnushka which flows into the Nalycheva river.

philipkglass• 6 years ago

Very interesting. It is mentioned here:

"Regionally Based Assessment of Persistent Toxic Substances: Central and Northeast Asia Regional Report"

United Nations Environment Programme, December 2002

https://iwlearn.net/resolveuid/1946c1f28aed08b804427301ae5e0...

Kamchatka Oblast - Pesticide landfill built in 1979-1982 at foot of Kozelsky volcano. 102 t of various pesticides.

...

In the Central and North East Asia Region, the former Soviet Union has major hot spots for obsolete pesticides. A meeting held in Moscow on 7-8 February, 2001 by the Arctic Council for “The ecological reasonable management in field of stores of out-of-date pesticides“ project have identified priority Regions whereby the inventory of out-of-date pesticides should be documented. These Regions are the Kamchatka Peninsula, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Magadan Oblast, Sakha Republic (Yakutia) and Tyumen Oblast of the Russian Federation. Furthermore, inventory for out-of-date pesticides in three sub-boreal Regions have been identified: Altai Krai, Kurgan and Omsk Oblast (Shekhovtsov, 2002). Members of the Commonwealth of Independent States have a large quantity of PTS which are obsolete and redundant. A conservative estimate suggests there is greater than 150000 t of obsolete pesticides. Much is in poor condition and not properly managed (PAN UK, 2000).

8bitsrule• 6 years ago

"After nearly two decades, Kamchatka recorded a net natural population growth instead of decline in 2007. However, in first half of 2008, the trend was reversed and population decline was observed again, partly due to an increased mortality rate among the rural population."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamchatka_Krai

A person might start to wonder whether massive planetary poisoning is part of some plan ... a useful 'side-effect'.

dmos622• 6 years ago

ecological reasonable management in field of stores of out-of-date pesticides

The "reasonable" rubs me the wrong way. Not "safe", not "holistic", but "reasonable". As in something that doesn't put a noticable dent in some bottom line.

andreasley• 6 years ago

From https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/332810-behind-ecological-disa...:

According to local media, there have already been leaks from buried pesticides. Regional agronomist Anatoly Fedorchenko said in 2006 that “this amount [20 tons of arsenic] is enough to poison the entire northern Pacific Ocean.” Although the landfill was mothballed in 2010, additional checks are now due to be carried out.

sradman• 6 years ago

It seems odd that most of the animals pictured live on the sea floor. There are mostly urchins and the starfish that feed on them with a disheartening number of giant pacific octopus mixed in.

aaron695• 6 years ago

Clearly natural. Humans couldn't do that.

What sort of nutters are Greenpeace to blame it on humans?

It's like they have no high school understanding of how the planet works.

irrational• 6 years ago

I assume that river wasn’t always yellow. If the river is followed upstream, is there a point where it is not yellow? What is happening just downstream from that? It would seem that a plane or satellite could quickly find the source.

timdj• 6 years ago

I 've also noticed that satellite imagery (Google Maps and Google Earth) have been blanked off for large areas of the relevant district of Kamchatka coast.. never seen that before except in and around the vicinity of top secret military bases. I don't buy the Russian authorities insistence that it's an oil spill, I've worked many oil spills and see no sign, in the Kamchatka images i've accessed, of any oil pollution. I had already come to the conclusion that it must be chemical and the info shared on this site has hardened that view, you get a lot of pheonols in "cides" and often various forms/types of hydrocarbons are involved in the "carriers" for cides. Like others on this site, I'd already fixed on the river and followed it's course up into the highlands where I'd deduce, from the mapping of Siberian wildfires, that there's been a lot of wildfire over recent years. This would generate major loss of tree cover, which in turn (in the evnt of heavy rainfall or snow melt) would lead to major erosion and infrastructure damage.. including the destruction of bunded or buried chemical waste repositories and subsequent leaks... would be great to know if any one's doing autopsy on dead marine life or has attempted sampling and analysis on the water.

LargoLasskhyfv• 6 years ago

Surfers raised alarm after once pristine waters caused major problems with eyesight, fevers and throat aches.

SURFERS in Kamchatka?! Err...Hardcore! Color me impressed!

Eco disaster at Kamchatka peninsula with mass death of sea animals

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