A new report coming from a Russian ship have UH researchers changing their predictions. Since the March 11th earthquake and tsunami, researchers have been predicting it would take about two years for the debris from Japan to hit Hawaii's west-facing beaches.“We have a rough estimate of 5 to 20 million tons of debris coming from Japan,” said UH computer programming researcher Jan Hafner. An average of 10 million tons of debris, the same amount released into the north Pacific basin in one year, was dislodged and set adrift in one day.“Hawaii is just in the path,” said Hafner. Since the disaster, Hafner has been watching and calculating that wave of debris on a specialized computer program that follows and analyzes the currents.
