Photo: Visitor7 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
On June 5, 2012, a concrete-and-steel dock about 66 feet long came ashore at Agate Beach, just north of Newport. It had crossed the Pacific from Misawa, a fishing port in northern Japan, after the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami tore it and other floating docks loose. A placard attached to it helped confirm where it came from.
A floating island of life
The dock drew crowds, but it worried scientists more than it impressed them. It was covered in living organisms that had ridden across the ocean, including a Japanese kelp, mussels, barnacles, crabs and sea stars. Researchers from Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center and state agencies sampled the growth and identified dozens of species from Japanese waters, some of them known as invasive elsewhere.
To keep those species from establishing on the Oregon coast, crews scraped the dock and sterilized the surface within days of its arrival. The case became one of the best-studied examples of tsunami debris carrying living species across an ocean, and later research on debris along the West Coast and Hawaii drew on it.
Removal
Because the dock sat on a busy public beach, the state contracted to remove it. Workers cut it into pieces and hauled them off the sand in the summer of 2012. A section was kept and set aside as a memorial to the tsunami and its victims.
Why it still matters here
The dock was a reminder that the 2011 tsunami also reached Oregon. Hours after the Japanese earthquake, surges damaged boats and docks on the southern Oregon coast, with the worst of it in Brookings. Oregon’s own Cascadia Subduction Zone can produce a similar earthquake much closer to home. Our guide to Lincoln County’s tsunami evacuation maps explains what that would mean.
Rosalind Teague covers ocean science, coastal hazards and the people who shaped the central coast.
