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Radioactive contamination at the Treasure Island Naval Station, where San Francisco plans to build a high-rise community for 20,000 residents, is more widespread than previously disclosed, according to a new U.S. Navy report and other documents obtained by The Bay Citizen.

The draft report, dated Aug. 6, marks the first time the Navy has fully acknowledged that the island, created from landfill in 1937, was used as a repair and salvage operation for a Pacific fleet exposed to atomic blasts during the Cold War. The report came in response to state regulators, who pressed for details after cleanup workers found radioactive waste in unexpected locations.

Known potential sources of radiation on the island included a nuclear training ship intentionally doused in radiation and even glow-in-the-dark buttons handed out at the 1939-1940 Golden Gate International Exposition held on the island.

a non-profit organization that estimates it has cleared nearly 1,000,000 pounds of plastic debris from Alaskan coasts over the past 10 years, is reporting “tons” of what it believes is likely tsunami debris washing up on the coasts of the Kayak and Montague islands. Chris Pallister, president of Gulf of Alaska Keeper, told Alaska’s KTUU TV that ““It’s a staggering mess [...] the magnitude of this is just hard to comprehend and I’ve been looking at this stuff a long time.

In my opinion, this is the single greatest environmental pollution event that has ever hit the west coast of North America. The slow-motion aspects of it have fooled an unwitting public. It far exceeds the Santa Barbara or Exxon Valdez oil spills in gross tonnage and also geographic scope. (I was in Prince William Sound during the during the Exxon Valdez oil spill and so have a sense of comparison). Tens of thousands of miles of coastline from California to the Aleutian Islands are going to be hit with billions of pounds of toxic debris. NOAA’s latest estimate is that 1.5 million tons of largely plastic debris will hit the western United States coast. That is 30 billion pounds. We expect Alaska to get the largest percentage of that with much of it lodging on northern Gulf of Alaska beaches. Most of this will be plastic which is full of inherent toxic chemicals that will leach into the environment for generations.

Possibly worse are the millions of containers full of anything from household chemicals to toxic industrial chemicals that are floating our way. They will eventually burst upon our shores…in sensitive inter-tidal spawning and rearing habitat, endangering shorebirds, marine mammals, fish and everything in between. We are already finding empty and partially full containers of tsunami related chemicals and fuel drums along the northern Gulf of Alaska shoreline. The heavier fuller containers will come later because the wind doesn’t push them as fast toward the Gulf of Alaska as they are more current driven. The light-weight, high-windage debris such as Styrofoam, buoys, bottles, empty containers and drums have already arrived in staggering quantities

Fresh snow bounces back 84 percent of the light that hits it; warm, rounded crystals can reflect as little as 70 percent. Slushy snow saturated by water – which gives it a gray cast, or even a bluish tint – reflects as little as 60 percent. Add dust or soot, and the albedo drops below 40 percent. Box's satellite data has shown a steady darkening in Greenland's albedo, from a July average of 74 percent when the century began to about 68 percent last year. And then came this summer: Without warning, the line on the albedo chart dropped deep into uncharted territory. At certain altitudes, the ice sheet in Greenland was suddenly four percent less reflective – in a single season.

But the future, pressing as it is, sometimes gives way to sheer awe at the scale of what we've already done. Simply by changing the albedo of the Greenland ice sheet, Box calculates, the island now absorbs more extra energy each summer than the U.S. consumes in a year. The shape and color of the ice sheet's crystals, in other words, are trapping more of the sun's rays than all the cars and factories and furnaces produce in the world's biggest economy. One of Box's collaborators, photographer James Balog, puts it like this: "Working in Greenland these past years has left me with a profound feeling of being in the middle of a decisive historic moment – the kind of moment, at least in geologic terms, that marks the grand tidal changes of history." Amid this summer's drama of drought, fire and record heat, the planet's destiny may have been revealed, in a single season, by the quiet metamorphosis of a silent, empty sheet of ice.