The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident released radionuclides directly into the ocean as a result of the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011. This material has been transported across the Pacific Ocean and detected in the northeastern Pacific. We began a surface ocean 129 I monitoring program a few months after this disaster in June 2011, with samples from Scripps Pier, La Jolla, California, USA, with the...

Environmental variables such as food supply, nodule abundance, sediment characteristics, and water chemistry may influence abyssal seafloor communities and ecosystem functions at scales from meters to thousands of kilometers. Thus, knowledge of environmental variables is necessary to understand drivers of organismal distributions and community structure, and for selection of proxies for regional variations in community structu...