In Japan there’s a scary sight on a port in Isumi City of Chiba Prefecture. The ground is covered in nearly 200 tonnes of dead, rotting sardines, and the ocean has been stained red with their blood. It looks like a beach from hell.
According to Japan Today, the rotting sardines started crashing onto the shore over the weekend and continued into this week. There are so many sardines on the ground that it looks like rocky sand. The smell from the sardines, as you can imagine, is awful and cleanup projects have begun to bury the sardines in landfills. The scariest thing is that no one is sure why this is happening; some are saying it’s a lack of oxygen, others are pointing to it as an omen for another disaster.
For comparison purposes, this is a picture of the port on a normal, sardine-free day. You can actually see the ground. [@yumihareyama, @dfnt, Japan Today via Business Insider]