What’s worse than DDT? We’ll find out. Photo: Schmidt Ocean Institute
A few years ago, the news hit screens that there was an enormous toxic waste dumping ground in the waters off the coast of Los Angeles. Hundreds of thousands of barrels of what was suspected to be the carcinogenic pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane — known commonly as DDT — are there on the ocean floor, and they’ve been there for decades. Now, however, strange rings are appearing around the barrels, making researchers think they might be full of something different.
Although it might come as a surprise that there are thousands of barrels of toxic waste rotting away off the coast of one of the world’s most famous cities, it shouldn’t.
“The world’s oceans have been widely used as disposal sites for industrial waste,” the authors of a study on the barrels wrote. “This was particularly true off the coast of Southern California where waste streams associated with the oil and gas industry, the military, and the manufacturing of chemicals including DDT, were legally discharged into the sewer or dumped directly into the ocean from the 1930s to the early 1970s.
The Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Research Vessel Falkor, a ship that frequently finds itself in the middle of amazing discoveries, sent a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) called SuBastian out to take a couple of samples after the weird rings were spotted. As it turned out, the DDT levels in the water didn’t go higher the closer it got to the barrels, which was unexpected. When they were able to carve a chunk off whatever was leaking out of the barrels, they found it had solidified around them into something like concrete.
They tested the pH, among many other things, and found that it was about 12. According to IFLScience, that meant that they were looking at some sort of “highly caustic alkaline waste.”
Also in the samples were tiny bits of microbial DNA that showed that anything living in the soil around the barrels were extremophiles that we generally find in some of the world’s harshest environments.
“One of the main waste streams from DDT production was acid and they didn’t put that into barrels,” said Johanna Gutleben, a Scripps postdoctoral scholar and the study’s first author, in a release. “It makes you wonder: What was worse than DDT acid waste to deserve being put into barrels?”
The rings, as it turns out, were created when the water and the waste in the barrels reacted chemically with each other to make a mineral called brucite. Although researchers are now relatively sure that the barrels don’t contain DDT, it’s not exactly great news.
“DDT was not the only thing that was dumped in this part of the ocean and we have only a very fragmented idea of what else was dumped there,” Gutleben said. “We only find what we are looking for and up to this point we have mostly been looking for DDT. Nobody was thinking about alkaline waste before this and we may have to start looking for other things as well.”
