‘These … have unforeseen, long-term consequences’
The study, conducted at a once-common industrial dump in Southern California, surprised researchers and offered as many questions as answers.
What’s going on?
A team from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography published: findings in the journal PNAS Nexus after examining rotting barrels off the coast of Los Angeles. While the team expected to find DDT waste in the immediate vicinity of the barrels, they instead found something completely different: caustic alkaline waste.
“One of the main wastes from DDT production was acid, and they didn’t put it in barrels,” said Johanna Gutleben, first author of the study. a press release. “It makes one wonder: What could be so bad that it deserves to be thrown into vats of DDT acid waste?”
Scientists found “white halos” around barrels where alkaline waste had leaked. Environmental damage was still evident in the surrounding areas. They observed that at least 50 years after the barrels were dumped, the nearby seafloor was similar. hydrothermal vents where only extremely resistant bacteria can survive.
“These formations were observed in one-third of visually detected barrels in the San Pedro Basin and resulted in unpredictable, long-term consequences,” the researchers wrote.
Why are these mysterious barrels important?
As Earth.com put itFrom the 1930s to the 1970s, this area became a “graveyard” for then-legal industrial waste. In this study, researchers identified 27,000 barrel-shaped objects on the seafloor among more than 300,000 objects estimated to have been discarded.
These barrels did not actually contain the pesticide DDT, which was banned in 1972. Instead, researchers are now beginning to confront the fact that what they are dealing with is different and possibly worse.
“We’re just finding what we’re looking for, and up to this point we’ve been mostly looking for DDT,” Gutleben said. “No one was thinking about alkaline waste before this, and we may have to start looking at other things.”
This development could be troubling if its impact on the seafloor compromises microbial mixing while impairing nitrogen and sulfur recycling. Earth.com tells. This could potentially affect larger marine organisms. Researchers say these changes may occur over centuries.
What is being done about the barrels?
Researchers are wary of being too aggressive when interacting with the barrels. They don’t know which ones are still sealed and which are empty. This poses a dilemma of whether to allow the barrels to slowly leak or potentially make the situation worse through aggressive cleanup.
These barrels are about 3,000 feet below the surface, which means robots and cables do most of the work. Mechanical or technological failure can cause alkaline waste to spread over a much larger area. For now, the researchers recommend further studies on white halo barrels.
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