and so sad.

Terrible writing here, trying to equate this fucking ecological crime with life giving natural hydrothermal vents.

The organisms found breathing H2S-laden water are very highly adapted for that -- either anaerobic, or symbiotic with anaerobics.

Journos appear to be thinking of brine pools, which are a very different phenomenon, not necessarily all that alkaline, just hypersaline and anoxic. These had been much in the news in CA, and certainly familiar at Scripps, a few years back.

Still, very bad writing (and fact-checking, which fails even at looking up definitions) for a public-facing source . It's not like there weren't any experts nearby to check with. Probably the Scripps researchers cringed when they saw what journos did with their info.

Seawater is alkaline (pH average ~8.1), meaning pOH is about 5.9. Dissolving 40g of sodium hydroxide (a strong, corrosive alkali) in 18,000 liters (less than 600 gallons) of water would give a solution less basic than that. With acidity and basicity, it's the concentration that makes it dangerous, and high dilution easily renders it harmless.

What the evidence shows, mostly, is that these barrels were well sealed, and that the alkali has been leaking out very slowly. Possibly, the best thing to do would be to poke a few small holes in each barrel, and let the alkali diffuse out slowly so that the conc'n drops off to something similar to the rest of the ocean around it -- quite harmlessly. The statement that the contents "will take thousands of years to break down" seems rather sloppy. Alkali is always present in the ocean, and it doesn't "break down", though it can be reversibly neutralized by acid. Unless ....

The BIG question is, why was this disposed of as "waste" ? Because it was used in some industrial process, and has other, quite possibly toxic, contaminants ? If so, that's a much larger concern than the simple presence of alkali. Alkali is safe when diluted, unlike many toxins. There is a chance that it was simply surplus to needs after wartime production shut down. That would be the best-case scenario, but more testing of the contents would be needed to establish that.

here's link to academic paper:

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/9/pgaf260/8249340?login=false

Some good news:

we collected sediment cores perpendicular to five deep-sea barrels. The concentration of DDT and its breakdown products were highly elevated relative to control sites yet did not vary with distance from the barrels, suggesting that {the barrels} were not associated with the contamination.

Other good news, it appears, is that if there is a huge proportion of alkali in those barrels, there's that much less DDT etc. simply for lack of room. Again, the long-term danger represented by the alkali is minimal -- in fact, seawater around the globe is increasing in acidity, so these may abate that by a quadrillionth part or so.

The latter included steel barrels that were reportedly punctured to facilitate sinking (1).

This would have allowed water and dissolved alkali to move in and out slowly & diffuse outward, and would have dissipated the alkali over time. Apparently, they didn't hole all of the barrels, or maybe this was due to some variation in contents.

It appears the DDT contamination may be a vestige of earlier mass dumping into sewers:

Montrose legally discharged thousands of gallons of DDT-contaminated acid and alkaline waste into the Los Angeles municipal sewer system, which heavily contaminated the Palos Verdes Shelf (1). Waste disposal was extended to offshore sites, with barges used to transport both bulk and containerized waste.

The bad news here is that the DDT etc. is probably already all loose in that area, and removing the barrels, even intact, probably wouldn't abate that problem.

I'm a bit bothered by this quote from a postdoc associated with this study, who really should have known better:

“It makes you wonder: What was worse than DDT acid waste to deserve being put into barrels?”

It wasn't necessarily "worse" by any measure -- acid rapidly corrodes steel, so disposing of the acid waste in barrels was not an option -- as the report says, it was dumped into the sewer. BTW, acid waste is likely to be all, or mostly, liquid. Solid alkali can be safely stored in steel, but not aluminum containers, and dumping it down the sewer would have required a huge amount of water and would have evolved a tremendous amount of heat (handling solid or highly concentrated alkalis is, in many ways, more hazardous than handling most acids, but most people don't realize this). So disposal in steel drums was, most likely the "most practical" option -- i.e., cheapest in direct cost$, and we know how much that counts -- not a matter of what it "deserve{d}". But best of all, it may have just been NaOH or KOH pellets shipped in steel barrels -- the normal way -- which just proved to be excess inventory, and may have even been disposed of in unopened containers. If true, the possibility of other contaminants, including DDT etc., effectively vanishes.

Will post some final commentary after a short break

In the San Pedro to Palos Verdes coast line is ruined with industrial waste and DDT going back to the 1930s. Once and a while there is a new story about it
It's a horrific and impossible mess.

The beach at RAT was "natural seepage".
Bullshit I remember full on oil spills where the whole beach was covered in that shit. It doesn't just go away..

Yes, they really were that stupid and irresponsible. So, many of these waste barrels have been leaking since dumped, and most were dumped in 1940s and 1950s.

Montrose Chemical, the major US DDT manufacturer, had a factory in Carson, an industrial town near San Pedro, California. It dumped a lot of barrels this way.

Montrose and its successor entities, like Chris-Craft, were sued by the State of California to force them to remediate the mess. A settlement was reached during trial in the 1990s where the defendants agreed to fund cleanup and monitoring. Seems to me cleaning up these barrels should be covered under that settlement agreement, if those barrels can be traced to Montrose.

We used to have nesting bald eagles on Catalina Island. They died off because of eggshell thinning caused by DDT. The weight of the bald eagle sitting on the eggs crushed them.

We have managed to reintroduce breeding bald bald eagles to Catalina, but it requires extreme intervention to get the eggs to hatch. DDT is still there, and still causing eggshell thinning. Biologists stake out a breeding pair and wait for an egg to get laid. Then they immediately rush to retrieve the egg, swapping it out for a fiberglass egg to trick the eagles into staying with the nest. Then the biologists incubate the egg in a lab in San Francisco, where it won't get crushed. When it is ready to hatch, they take it back to the nest, swapping it out with the fake egg. The eagles thus become happy parents, as the egg cracks open revealing a healthy chick.