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.
I tried to generate a "story" using Planet imagery:
<a href="https://www.planet.com/stories/kamtchatka-eco-disaster-4zV9_lFMg" rel="nofollow">https://www.planet.com/stories/kamtchatka-eco-disaster-4zV9_...</a>
The imagery from May 22 seems especially suspicious. Unfortunately there are some large gaps of images available (at least to me!)<p>edit: apparently I had too many filters on. Here's one with slightly more imagery:
<a href="https://www.planet.com/stories/more-kamchatka-eco-disater-fr3rulFMg" rel="nofollow">https://www.planet.com/stories/more-kamchatka-eco-disater-fr...</a><p>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...
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).<p>I wonder what kind of chemicals fit that profile?<p>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.
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.
related: there was another large poison spill in russia this year:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norilsk_oil_spill" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norilsk_oil_spill</a>
Kamchatka isalso home to a great deal of volcanic and geothermal activity. The cause here <i>might</i> not be human.<p><a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=KILQ0M5ilIo" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=KILQ0M5ilIo</a>
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.
It's not surprising considering the way they handled the military nuclear accident last year:<p><a href="https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/security/2019/10/wreak-barge-nenoksa-accident-ends-kola-radioactive-scrap-site" rel="nofollow">https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/security/2019/10/wreak-bar...</a>
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.
Surfers raised alarm after once pristine waters caused major problems with eyesight, fevers and throat aches.<p><i>SURFERS</i> in Kamchatka?! Err...Hardcore! Color me impressed!
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.<p>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.<p>Sort of like the intermontane west generally in the US. Wasteland, right?
Clearly natural. Humans couldn't do that.<p>What sort of nutters are Greenpeace to blame it on humans?<p>It's like they have no high school understanding of how the planet works.