Thread by @DrEricDing

My god—over 25,000 drums of@toxic waste found dumped on the ocean floor off coast of California. The number of drums laced with the pesticide DDT far exceeded expectations. “It was hard to wrap my head around the density”. And they are likely leaking. 🧵
nytimes.com/2021/04/28/us/…

2) The findings, which were presented to California’s congressional delegation at a briefing on Monday, may help explain the extraordinarily high rate of cancer in adult sea lions in the area, Dr. Valentine, who served as a consultant on the recent mission, said

3) The latest images also suggest that a ticking time bomb lurks 3,000 feet below the surface.

Some of the barrels may have been languishing for as long as 70 years, Dr. Valentine estimated.

4) But because the 3 foot by 2 foot industrial drums are now disintegrating, it is possible that the waste is more of a threat now than when the barrels were dumped there in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.

5) “As these drums potentially lose their containment function, the materials will make their way into the environment and food web,” Dr. Terrill said.

may have already entered the food chain, working its way into fish and other marine life, he said.

6) In a statement on Monday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, who organized the congressional briefing, called the barrels “one of the biggest environmental threats on the West Coast.”

7) “The expedition’s findings confirm fears that a large number of barrels containing DDT-laced industrial waste were dumped off the coast of California and are now impacting marine life and potentially public health,”
Precisely how much DDT the barrels contain is not yet clear.

8) scientists mapped 36,000 acres of steep seafloor between Catalina Island and Los Angeles — an area bigger than the city of San Francisco, as The Los Angeles Times noted — the researchers were trying to determine how many barrels lay beneath the water.

9) The mission was inspired by a scientific paper Dr. Valentine published in 2019 and an L.A. Times investigation published in October that expanded on the paper.

latimes.com/projects/la-co…

10) Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane was first synthesized in 1874. In 1939, Paul Hermann Müller figured out that it could kill insects, a discovery that earned him a Nobel Prize in 1948…

11) Attitudes toward this useful tool for agriculture and fighting malaria shifted drastically after the publication of Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking 1962 environmental best seller, “Silent Spring.”

12) Ms. Carson warned that overused pesticides like DDT washed into waterways and moved along the food chain, threatening delicate ecosystems for birds, fish and, ultimately, humans.

13) The book “made a powerful case for the idea that if humankind poisoned nature, nature would in turn poison humankind,” Eliza Griswold wrote in a 2012 New York Times Magazine article about how Carson’s book ignited the environmental movement.

14) In 1972, DDT was banned in the United States. The fact that the seafloor off the coast of California contains remnants from DDT’s heyday has long been known.

In 2015, Dr. Aluwihare published a study that found high concentrations of DDT in the blubber of bottlenose dolphins.

15) “The extent of the dumping ground helps to explain some of these previous observations,” she said.
Senator Feinstein said she planned to ask the Justice Department to find out which companies dumped the barrels and to hold them accountable.

16) Her office declined to elaborate on which companies would be investigated. Montrose Chemical Corporation, at one time the world’s largest manufacturer of DDT, was repeatedly named in the briefing.

17) This work was led by @RosannaXia of the @latimes who has been reporting this crisis for years. Only recently did they did the survey to map out how many drums there are. And it’s a mind numbing insane amount. latimes.com/environment/st…

18) DDT likely caused breast cancer in women in the 1950s/60s. Then their daughters, who had been exposed in the womb—Researchers have also linked DDT exposure to obesity, birth defects, reduced fertility and testicular cancer in sons. @RosannaXia reports. latimes.com/environment/st…

19) Here is the front page story on DDT dumping by the reporter who broke the news from the very beginning years ago… by @RosannaXia.

https://twitter.com/rosannaxia/status/1387105152784494595

20) wow, I missed this part—even the **GRANDDAUGHTERS of women who were exposed to DDT during pregnancy** also suffer from significant health threats:

➡️They have higher rates of obesity and menstrual periods that start before age 11. latimes.com/environment/st…

21) “Not only is a pregnant woman and her baby vulnerable to the (DDT) chemicals that she’s exposed to — but so is her future grandchild”

22) so *how* are granddaughters affected? Since a female is born with all her eggs, a granddaughter is technically also exposed to DDT if her mother was exposed in the womb!

Damn. latimes.com/environment/st…