{"id":1324,"date":"2023-03-24T14:42:03","date_gmt":"2023-03-24T18:42:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/?p=1324"},"modified":"2023-03-24T14:42:43","modified_gmt":"2023-03-24T18:42:43","slug":"scientists-uncover-startling-concentrations-of-pure-ddt-along-seafloor-off-l-a-coast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/education\/scientists-uncover-startling-concentrations-of-pure-ddt-along-seafloor-off-l-a-coast\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists uncover pure DDT along seafloor off L.A. coast"},"content":{"rendered":"

First it was the eerie images of barrels<\/a> leaking on the seafloor not far from Catalina Island. Then the shocking realization that the nation\u2019s largest manufacturer of DDT had once used the ocean as a huge dumping ground<\/a> \u2014 and that as many as half a million barrels of its acid waste had been poured straight into the water.<\/a><\/p>\n

Now, scientists have discovered that much of the DDT \u2014 which had been dumped largely in the 1940s and \u201950s \u2014 never broke down. The chemical remains in its most potent form in startlingly high concentrations, spread across a wide swath of seafloor larger than the city of San Francisco.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe still see original DDT on the seafloor from 50, 60, 70 years ago, which tells us that it\u2019s not breaking down the way that [we] once thought it should,\u201d said UC Santa Barbara scientist David Valentine, who shared these preliminary findings Thursday during a research update with more than 90 people working on the issue. \u201cAnd what we\u2019re seeing now is that there is DDT that has ended up all over the place, not just within this tight little circle on a map that we referred to as Dumpsite Two.\u201d<\/p>\n

These revelations confirm some of the science community\u2019s deepest concerns \u2014 and further complicate efforts to understand DDT\u2019s toxic and insidious legacy in California. Public calls for action have intensified since The Times reported<\/a> in 2020 that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, banned in 1972, is still haunting the marine environment today. Significant amounts of DDT-related compounds continue to accumulate in California condors<\/a> and local dolphin populations<\/a>, and a recent study linked the presence of this once-popular pesticide to an aggressive cancer<\/a> in sea lions.<\/p>\n

Read more from Rosanna Xia of the LA Times<\/em>:\u00a0 https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/environment\/story\/2023-03-23\/scientists-uncover-startling-concentrations-of-pure-ddt-along-seafloor-off-l-a-coast<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First it was the eerie images of barrels leaking on the seafloor not far from Catalina Island. Then the shocking realization that the nation\u2019s largest manufacturer of DDT had once used the ocean as a huge dumping ground \u2014 and that as many as half a million barrels of its acid waste had been poured…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1865,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1865"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1324"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1327,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1324\/revisions\/1327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}