An investigation into a once rampant industrial waste site in Southern California has surprised researchers and raised as many questions as answers.
What happened?
A team from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego published their findings in the journal PNAS Nexus after examining rotting barrels off the coast of Los Angeles. While the team expected to find DDT waste near the barrels, they instead found something entirely different—corrosive alkaline waste.
“One of the major waste streams in DDT production is acid, and they don’t put it in barrels,” Johanna Gutleben, lead author of the study, said in a press release. “It makes you wonder: What could be worse than DDT acid waste that deserves to be put in barrels?”
Scientists have discovered a ‘white halo’ around a barrel where alkaline waste leaked. Environmental damage remains evident in surrounding areas. At least 50 years after the barrels were dumped, they observed that the nearby seafloor resembled hydrothermal vents, where only extremely tough bacteria could survive.
“These formations were observed in one-third of the visually identified barrels in the San Pedro Basin and had unforeseen long-term consequences,” the researchers wrote.
Why are these mysterious barrels important?
As Earth.com puts it, the area has become a “graveyard” for legal industrial waste from the 1930s to the 1970s. In the study, researchers found more than 300,000 barrel-shaped objects on the seafloor, 27,000 of which had been dumped.
The barrels did not actually contain the pesticide DDT, which was banned in 1972. Instead, researchers are now coming to terms with the fact that they are dealing with something different, perhaps even worse.
“We can only find what we want, and so far we’re mainly looking for DDT,” Gutben said. “No one has thought about alkaline waste before, and we may have to start looking for other things as well.”
As Earth.com describes, the impact of this development on the seafloor could be troubling if it impairs nitrogen and sulfur cycles while harming the mix of microorganisms. This could affect larger marine life. Researchers say these changes could last for centuries.
What was done to the barrel?
The researchers were reluctant to interact too aggressively with the barrels. They don’t know which ones are still sealed and which ones are empty. This presents a dilemma: allow the barrel to slowly leak, or potentially make the situation worse through aggressive cleaning.
The barrels are about 3,000 feet below the surface, which means robots and cables are doing a lot of work. Mechanical or technical failures may discharge alkaline waste into a larger area. For now, the researchers recommend further study of barrels with white halos.
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