by Julia Pierrepont III

LOS ANGELES, May 1 (Xinhua) -- In the latest chapter in a decades-old pollution scandal that spawned one of the worst toxic waste sites in America, ocean scientists said early this week that they had found approximately 27,000 barrels on the ocean floor in Los Angeles's coastal waters that were believed to contain DDT, the toxic pesticide banned in the United States in 1972.

Prompted by widespread reports of historic toxic dumping and lingering concerns from researchers and scientists, University of California San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers searched for a rumored undersea toxic dump site by mapping over 56 square miles (145 square kilometers) of the California seabed between Los Angeles and Catalina Island in March.

Eric Terrill, director of the Marine Physical Laboratory at Scripps and chief scientist of the mapping expedition disclosed that high tech underwater drones using sonar technology captured high-resolution images of 27,345 barrels littering the ocean floor 900 meters down.

"Unfortunately, the basin offshore Los Angeles had been a dumping ground for industrial waste for several decades, beginning in the 1930s," lamented Terrill. "We found an extensive debris field in the wide area survey."

Between 320 and 700 tons of DDT were believed to have been dumped in the area, while shipping records indicate those estimates could go as high as half a million barrels.

This area was already reeling from the illegal dumping of massive concentrations of DDT by Montrose Chemical Corp. of California and other industrial chemical companies into local sewers that emptied out into Southern California beaches.

This illegal dumping went on from the late 1940s until the Marine Protection, Research and Sanctuaries Act, aka the Ocean Dumping Act, was passed into law in 1972.

The discovery opens a floodgate of environmental and biological questions for local, state, and federal agencies, who are concerned that those toxic waste had leaked then impacted marine wildlife and local residents.

"There are implications across the entire food web, all the way to humans, that we don't understand just yet," explained Terrill to Mashable news website Friday.

"Are those chemicals moving into the food web or are they staying somewhat in place? We don't really know," agreed Katherine Pease, a biologist and the science and policy director at Heal the Bay, an environmental advocacy group in Los Angeles.

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, more commonly known as DDT, is a powerful chemical invented by the Swiss chemist, Paul Hermann Muller, who won the Nobel Prize in 1948 for discovering DDT as a "miracle" pesticide. But even he cautioned that no one fully understood how the chemical interacted with the living world.

It wasn't until decades later that the harmful effects of DDT began to surface. In Southern California, massive DDT contamination in the Palos Verdes area south of Los Angeles, led to tainted fish, cancerous sea lions, dying dolphins, the near extinction of local eagles and falcons, and the increased risks of breast cancer in a new generation of women exposed to DDT through their contaminated mothers.

DDT is easily stored in fat cells and takes generations to break down, which contributes to its "biomagnification" properties which causes it to accumulate in higher and higher doses in animals - and humans - that feed on contaminated creatures further down the food chain.

In the ocean, the food chain begins with tiny one-celled phytoplankton algae, which are the foundation for most ocean-based, food-web systems.

"These results also raise questions about the continued exposure and potential impacts on marine mammal health, especially in light of how DDT has been shown to have multi-generational impacts in humans," warned Dr. Lihini Aluwihare, a Scripps chemical oceanographer, professor of geosciences, and co-author of a 2015 study of DDT in dolphins.

Marine biologist, activist and author, Rachel Carson, sparked an eco-movement in the 1960s with the publication of her book, Silent Spring, in which she condemned, "the reckless and irresponsible poisoning of the world that man shares with all other creatures."

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the DDT alarm was repeatedly raised by other conscientious whistleblowers like Allan Chartrand, at that time a scientist at the California Regional Water Quality Control, now an eco-toxicologist in Seattle; and David Valentine, a University of California Santa Barbara professor who found the first smaller dump site.

In 1990s, they were joined by M. Indira Venkatesan, a geochemist at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) whose analysis showed that the DDT concentrations in local waters were far too high to be accounted for.

But, with no "smoking gun" available to prove their case, no one listened.

Now, with dramatic videos of tens of thousands of rusty barrels leaking toxic poisons out onto the ocean floor within spitting distance of one of America's most populated cities, the evidence is incontestable and a public furor has begun.

"This stuff really is down there. It has been sitting here this whole time, right off our shore," Valentine said.

Disposing of hazardous military explosives, industrial, chemical, refinery, acids, cyanide, and even nuclear waste in the ocean was a widespread practice throughout the 20th Century, in the belief that "dilution is the solution to pollution." So, the culprits can be hard to trace.

California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, said that the findings might represent only a small portion of the number of toxic dumps hidden in the sea, demanded that the companies responsible for the dumping be held accountable for the massive, multi-million-dollar cleanup - particularly since at least one sample showed DDT concentrations 40 times greater than those recorded at the federally-designated, Superfund hazardous waste site in Palos Verdes, CA.

"Simply put, this is one of the biggest environmental threats on the West Coast," she said. "It's also one of the most challenging because these barrels are 3,000 feet below the ocean's surface and there aren't many records of who did the dumping, where exactly it occurred or how many barrels were dumped."

Valentine pointed out that the health of oceans impacts on the ecosystem of the entire planet - including its people. "We owe it to ourselves to figure out what happened, what's actually down there, and how much it's all spreading," he warned.

Mark Gold, a longtime champion of the DDT issue and now California Governor Gavin Newsom's Deputy Secretary for Coast and Ocean Policy, expressed his displeasure at the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) lack of progress in abating the state's DDT contamination.

"To have the EPA say, 25 years later, that maybe the best thing to do is to just let nature take its course is, frankly, nothing short of nauseating," Gold said in frustration. "Nobody in their worst nightmares," he said, "ever thought there would be half a million barrels of DDT waste dumped into the ocean off of L.A. County's coast."

"Disposing any waste, where you don't see and forget about it, does not solve the problem," Venkatesan cautioned. "The problem eventually comes back to haunt us." Enditem

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