Fresh concerns as hordes of fish & marine life washes ashore in new location in Russia’s Far Eastern Kamchatka peninsula (VIDEO)

Unexplained deaths of sea life are continuing to cause anxiety in Russia’s Far East. On Tuesday, fish, octopuses and crabs were filmed washed ashore hundreds of kilometers away from the spot where the alarm was first raised.

A video of the ecological disaster near Ozernovskiy village on Kamchatka’s western coast shows dead marine creatures scattered along a 50-meter-wide area of the beach. The peninsula, some 7,000km east of Moscow, is home to one of the earth's most pristine environments. 

The footage is similar to clips that came from Avacha Bay on the opposite eastern coast in late September, when numerous marine life washed ashore. By land, the distance between Ozernovskiy and Avacha Bay is around 250 kilometers.

Scientists have flown to the site by helicopter to take samples from the water, and remove soil and animal carcasses for analysis, local authorities said. The Prosecutor’s Office and environmental watchdog Rosprirodnadzor are also sending their people to Ozernovskiy.

“We are faced with a large-scale new phenomenon that science has yet to comprehend,” said Kamchatka’s governor, Vladimir Solodov.

The fact that the beaches near Ozernovskiy are clean, according to witnesses, and because of the large distance between the two contamination spots, it is unlikely that the “local man-made facility near Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky” is to blame for the disaster, he pointed out.

The governor was presumably referring to the Kozelsk chemical landfill, which stands on the river flowing into Avacha Bay. A possible leak from the landfill has been considered among the potential reasons for the death of 95 percent of sea life in the area. It’s believed that it’ll take the fauna up to 15 years to fully recover.

Water samples taken from Avacha Bay after the disaster showed that the concentration of phosphates, iron, phenols and ammonium were seven times higher than normal. But a specific agent that caused the contamination couldn’t be established.

Russia's Investigative committee has launched a criminal probe into the incident.

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