Waste barrels dating back to contracts that make dead dead areas off the coast of Los Angeles

Until 1972, the Pacific Ocean waters in southern California Serve As a flooding land for dangerous and industrial waste. After more than 50 years, eroded metal barrels are still scattered on the sea floor off the Los Angeles coast, and scientists began only to understand the consequences of throwing them in the ocean.

Promain photos first back In 2020, with some are surrounded by mysterious white circles on the sea floor. Experts initially tied the barrels to DDT – toxic pesticides that Montrose Chemical Corporation, which was regular investigation It cannot confirm this intuition. Now, researchers have discovered that the aura bounds actually contain caustic alkaline waste that transformed parts of the sea floor into extremist environments.

“We find only what we are looking for and even this point,” said Johanna Gotlebien, a post -doctoral researcher at the Scripps Foundation at the University of California, San Diego at the University of California. statement. “No one was thinking about alkaline waste before that and we had to start searching for other things as well.”

The results published on Tuesday in the magazine PNAS NexusHe showed that it could cause alkaline waste that is supposed to cause pollution for 50 years, which leads to unexpected consequences for the heavy societies, according to researchers.

A puzzle that was solved by chance

When Gutelben and her colleagues on board the “Falkour” research ship at the Schmidt Institute in 2021 sailed, their goal was not to solve the Hallos mystery, according to the University of California in San Diego. The team began measuring pollution levels near Santa Catalina Island, using a Revy -run vehicle called Subastian to collect sediment nuclei near five waste depths of the seas.

Three of those five barrels have Halos, however. Inside those white circles, the sediments were difficult as concrete, which prevented researchers from extracting samples with their overcoming devices. Instead, they used the Rove Rove and Rove arm to extract a piece of hardening deposit from one of the barrels.

The analysis of sediment samples showed that DDT levels did not rise closer to the barrels, indicating that they are not the source of this pollution. The samples that were taken near the barrels with halos showed very alkaline pH levels, and the hard cortex proved to be made of a mineral called Prosite.

The researchers prompted the belief that alkaline waste leaked from the barrels and interacted with magnesium in the sea to establish Bruussite, which strengthened the sea floor. While the brutality dissolves slowly, this maintains the high levels of pH in the sediment around the barrels. When sea water interacts with alkaline deposits, the sediments of the circular white calcium carbonate – or the aura – take.

The perfect house for the extremist

Only very specialized microbes can stay in such alkaline conditions. This explains why Gotlebo and her colleagues have struggled to extract the microbial DNA from the sediment samples that are captured across the auras. The few species that they discovered were extremes adapt to alkaline environments, such as water thermal openings in the depths of the seas or hot alkaline springs.

“This adds to our understanding of the consequences of throwing these barrels,” said a great author Paul Jensen, an honorary microbiologist in Scripps, in the statement. “It is a horrific thing that after 50 years, I still see these effects,” he said. “We cannot determine the environmental effect without knowing the number of these barrels with the white auras there, but it is clear that it has a local effect on the microbes.”