Tsunami Debris Field -- Are There Bodies in the Floating Trash?

Scientists from the University of Hawaii announced earlier this year that a massive debris field created by Japan's Tohoku earthquake and tsunami was making its way across the Pacific Ocean and would eventually wash ashore in Hawaii and along the west coast of Canada and the United States. According to the Associated Press, a Russian ship, the STS Pallada, reported this week that it had passed through floating debris (had even brought some items aboard), signaling to researchers that their projections of the debris field's movement were accurate. But as the floating field of trash makes its way to Midway Island's shores, then on to Hawaii and America, is it too much to expect for any of the 3,724 Japanese citizens still missing in the aftermath of the catastrophe to be found?

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a Seattle oceanographer specializing in ocean debris, told the Silicon Valley Mercury News back in July that dead bodies in the refuse would decompose and sink. He also noted that there was a posibility of "some macabre discoveries, like feet in tennis shoes, which have washed up before on Northwest beaches and have been linked with DNA tests to missing persons who drowned."

Although actual bodies -- or at least intact bodies -- may not be found, there appears to be the possibility that various body parts could very well eventually make their way to a far shore, preserved, encapsulated, and/or trapped within some item or piece of buoyant wreckage. And as gruesome as it might at first appear, the recovery of a body part could be the link to finding a missing person and thus allay the continuing worries and fears of families and friends still searching for the missing in Japan.

An indelicate topic, to be sure, but one of great importance to those with missing family members and friends in the prefectures impacted by the 9.0 magnitude megathrust earthquake and the subsequently generated tsunami that devastated Japan's northeast coast on March 11. The massive tsunami, which saw waves of up to 135 feet in height, swept assure within minutes of the earthquake, leaving devastation and ruin in its wake. And as the water receded back to the ocean from whence it came, it took with it tons of items. That initial washing away became a floating, spreading, attriting mass with an estimated tonnage of 20 million.

Even with the outside chance of a very few of the missing being identified in this manner, the number of missing will most likely remain in the thousands due to time in the ocean, exposure, the aforementioned natural decomposition, and animal ingestion. Still, as the Pallada indicated with the items it recovered, such as a small fishing boat from Fukushima prefecture, part of the debris field consists of large and intact objects capable of containing parts of an unfortunate victim of the tsunami.

While much of the Japanese tsunami's debris field will eventually end up on beaches bordering the Pacific Ocean, experts indicate that a good portion of the trash will wind up at the bottom of the ocean at the end of a long journey in an area called the North Pacific Garbage Patch, a whirlpool region of the ocean described by CNN as hundreds of miles wide.

ABC News noted that the Texas-sized flotilla of trash seemed to be moving a little faster than expected. Currently, it is believed to be on course to deposit material at Midway this winter, Hawaii by early 2013, and the western U. S. by 2014.

The official death toll from the earthquake and tsunami confirmed by the National Police Agency nearly topped 16,000. The number of missing fell to below 3,800 (3,724) by September.