Researchers reveal massive underwater 'graveyard' linked to US officials: 'These … have unforeseen, long-term consequences'

A survey of a once-rampant industrial dump site in Southern California surprised researchers and presented as many questions as answers.

What's happening?

The team from UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography published its findings in PNAS Nexus journal after examining decaying barrels off the coast of Los Angeles. While the team expected to find DDT waste in the immediate area of barrels, it instead found something entirely different — caustic alkaline waste.

"One of the main waste streams from DDT production was acid and they didn't put that into barrels," said Johanna Gutleben, the study's first author, in a press release. "It makes you wonder: What was worse than DDT acid waste to deserve being put into barrels?"

Scientists found "white halos" around barrels where alkaline waste leaked. In the surrounding areas, the environmental damage was still evident. At least 50 years after the barrels were dumped, they observed the nearby seafloor resembling hydrothermal vents where only extremely resilient bacteria could survive.

"These formations were observed at one-third of the visually identified barrels in the San Pedro Basin and have unforeseen, long-term consequences," the researchers wrote.

Why are these mystery barrels important?

As Earth.com put it, this area has become a "graveyard" for then-legal industrial waste from the 1930s-1970s. In this study, researchers spotted 27,000 barrel-shaped objects on the seafloor among the over 300,000 that were estimated to have been dumped.

These barrels didn't actually contain the 1972-banned pesticide DDT. Instead, researchers are now coming to grips with the fact that it's something different, and possibly worse, that they are dealing with.

"We only find what we are looking for and up to this point we have mostly been looking for DDT," said Gutleben. "Nobody was thinking about alkaline waste before this and we may have to start looking for other things as well."

This development could be troubling if its impact on the seafloor damages nitrogen and sulfur recycling while compromising the microbial mix, as Earth.com describes. That could potentially impact larger marine organisms. Researchers say these changes could take place over centuries.

What's being done about the barrels?

Researchers are hesitant to be too aggressive in interacting with the barrels. They don't know which ones are still sealed and which are empty. That presents a dilemma of whether to allow barrels to slowly leak or potentially make matters worse through aggressive cleanup.

These barrels are some 3,000 feet below the surface, which means robots and cables are doing a lot of the work. Mechanical or technological failure could send alkaline waste into a much larger area. For now, the researchers advise further study on the barrels with white halos.

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