"Ghost ship" off the coast of Canada

Seattle - A Japanese-owned fishing boats drifting empty off the west coast of Canada thought to be the first wave of 1.5 million tons of debris that moves in the direction of North America from the tsunami in Japan last March.

Wreckage of coastal towns wiped out in Japan - including refrigerators, washing machines, televisions, roofs and fishing nets - is inevitably moving eastward across the Pacific and may arrive sooner than expected, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

"The first clue is that all these objects that are in a higher position in the water can potentially move across the Pacific Ocean more rapidly than we originally thought," said Director of the NOAA Marine Debris Program, Nancy Wallace. The program had predicted Japan's tsunami debris recently arrived on the coast of North America in 2013.

"Things are moving faster ... it really could be on the beach a lot faster - so much faster now," said Wallace, as quoted by Reuters

On March 20, the Department of Transport Canada to see what he says as an empty Japanese fishing boat in the sea 150 miles south of the Queen Charlotte Islands, adjacent to British Columbia.

The ship has been declared a danger to shipping, but Canada has not said what - if any - he will do on the ship. Coast Guard declared the country would only take action if a fuel spill from the ship. But that seems unlikely.

So-called "ghost ships" is the first evidence that a large piece of debris the tsunami Japan is moving toward the United States.

"It was confirmed that the debris caused by the tsunami will land on the west coast of North America," said Nicholas Mallos, a conservation biologist and marine debris in an independent agency Ocean Conservancy, which monitors the ocean trash problem.

"However, how the amount of debris, how to shape, most of these questions remain unanswered," he said.

NOAA, which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, initially expecting to see the debris arriving in the northern islands of Hawaii in the winter of this year and has moved slowly to Alaska, Canada, and U.S. West Coast next year.

But all of the prophecy, which was made shortly after the tsunami struck Japan on wind and current models are limited, proved inaccurate.

The agency found the debris moved to the north of the northernmost territory of Hawaii, and continues to move to North America, said Wallace. The institution is now changing his predictions.

Earthquake with a strength of 9.0 on the Richter scale shook off the coast of northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011, thus triggering the 23-meter-high wall of water, which leveled with the ground all the buildings in various towns on the coast, killing 16,000 people. Three thousand people go undiscovered until now.