EARTH
This map portrays a few examples of modern animals whose ancestors dispersed by voyaging on natural rafts across open water, including lemurs, which rafted from Africa to Madagascar, and chameleons, which rafted from Madagascar to islands in the Indian Ocean. Rafting routes are delineated by the green arrows. IMAGE/Kathleen Cantner, AGI
On June 5, 2012, several thousand castaways rode a massive boxcar-sized dock to landfall on Oregon’s Agate Beach, just north of Newport. A plaque on the side, written in Japanese, revealed an unprecedented journey: The dock had been unmoored from the Japanese coastal city of Misawa during the catastrophic tsunami on March 11, 2011.
The dock and its inhabitants — as many as a hundred species, including mollusks, anemones, sponges, oysters, crabs, barnacles, worms, sea stars, mussels and sea urchins — spent more than a year at sea, drifting 8,000 kilometers across the Pacific Ocean. Within hours of the dock’s discovery, marine biologists from Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center were on the scene, identifying species and raising red flags.
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