Fish Factor

Soccer balls…motorcycles… reminders of the massive tsunami in Japan a year ago are now appearing along Alaska’s coastlines.

“It’s safe to say that tsunami debris is here,” said Merrick Burden, director of the Juneau-based Marine Conservation Alliance Foundation.

Since January the MCA has been tracking where and the kinds of debris that is coming ashore, and whether it is radioactive (none so far), at Kodiak, Yakutat, Sitka and Craig where the wreckage was first likely to hit.

“What we’re finding are wind driven objects like buoys, Styrofoam, and large containers, some of which contain material...