DDT dump site off L.A. coast much bigger than scientists expected
latimes.com
latimes.com
We built and operate the ROV Jason and AUV Sentry, which were previously used to map these dumpsites[1]. We are always working on innovative vehicle capabilities and are currently looking for data scientists, software/mechanical/electrical engineers, machine learning specialists, etc. to help us. It's also a great opportunity to take a sabbatical by the beach :)
1: http://4dgeo.whoi.edu/geo-bin/GB_cmd?cmd=SlideShow&Match=201...
Public outreach is very important for ocean science so we (WHOI) do have a visitor center and regularly host events[1] on campus and online. I'm not aware of anything for volunteers right now but in the past we have asked for help labeling data sets or reporting marine mammal sightings[2].
1: https://www.whoi.edu/who-we-are/visit-whoi/events-happenings...
Appreciate the links though - will definitely keep an eye on the websites next time I'm the area!
Your dollars are worth ~20% less (nothing pays even close to 20% higher) and unless you have big dreams of running a tourist facing business (or fleecing the people who fleece the tourists) there is squat for opportunity there.
I would only accept a job at Woods Hole if it will specifically further your career.
The Cape has a lot more unique stuff than the average vacation region, as you can see Woods Hole is there.
So much bitterness and cynicism on HN.
Yes, and they all suck as places to actually live (possible exception if you're retired and have lots of money) for those same reasons.
>The Cape has a lot more unique stuff than the average vacation region, as you can see Woods Hole is there.
Every vacation area has some similar myth that they pour into the kool aid in order to convince themselves they're important and that it's not just about the tourism industry.
>So much bitterness and cynicism on HN.
I'm bitter because I lived it.
Geology can't work its magic on that godforsaken sandbar fast enough.
There is some decent opportunity in the trades but not if you're not already an established professional but outside the tourism industries there isn't much.
If you have any ambition to do anything to anything people will stand in your way and put up roadblocks because your expanding liquor store or auto-body shop (or whatever) isn't what they think is "befitting the local character".
Someone: Work at Woods Hole! We're hiring.
You: The Cape sucks, don't go there.
Me: If you have a good job, come here and advocate for change.
Where did we go off the rails?
> so please if you're young and have the income to support a life here please do so!
Please feed into our pyramid scheme so I can continue to maintain my quality of life? Guy, what? Nobody is just handing out money, why do you expect it to be handed to you?
I can't believe I'm defending "advocating for the Cape" on Hacker News of all places.
My wife and I built our business from the ground up, but couldn't have done so without family support and some advantages that others do not have. This privilege is something we recognize and work to "fix" by participating in local government and biz development organizations.
Getting "young" working families to simply show up at town hall is a huge challenge but we're working on it, and are not going to let the Cape slide into just a place for the wealthy, elderly and second home-owners.
Compared to Silicon Valley, it's a massive bargain. Our house on the Cape is a "mansion" compared to what we could afford if we lived in Silicon Valley.
I even spent a few months living in Falmouth, near Woods hole. Homes were affordable, schools were good, prices were reasonable. Can you find a cheaper place to live? Yes, but it's all about your priorities. You can have a mansion in the middle of nowhere or a reasonable house a 15-minute walk from the beach.
Anyway, after moving around a lot in my early life, what I can tell you is that if you can't figure out how to be happy in a generally middle-class location like Cape Cod, you won't be happy anywhere.
Edit: As pointed out below, there are some remote software developer roles right now.
Physical Requirements Physical duties for this position include but are not limited to, visual abilities to include depth perception, ability to see peripherally, ability to adjust vision to bring objects into focus, ability to distinguish basic colors. Ability to hear and respond to instructions. Ability to work with and around others as well as alone. Other physical tasks include occasional standing/walking; manual dexterity and mobility, use of hands for basic/fine grasping/manipulation, and repetitive motion (keyboard and mouse). Physical duties are subject to change.
And this is for Software Manager:
Physical Requirements No pre-determined physical requirements; all candidates should be encouraged to apply.
... And the ship job is not so glamourous as you think.
Oceanography is fantastic, I enjoyed it a lot, but people shouldn't build a wrong image in their mind. This is hard work.
> “This mission confirms my worst fear: that possibly hundreds of thousands of barrels and DDT-laced sediment were dumped just 12 miles off our coast,” said Feinstein, who said she plans to ask the U.S. Justice Department to look into companies that may have illegally dumped waste into the ocean and whether they can be held accountable
Sounds pretty hand-wavey though.
The U.S. banned its use in 1972, but the chemical, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, is so stable it continues to poison the environment and move up the food chain.
One thing we do for petrochemical spills is release microbes that digest petrochemicals so the spill can be broken down. I wonder if we could develop a similar means to clean up DDT.
That's sad, though. "Radioactive" is a synonym to "the problem solves itself given enough time". Non-radioactive toxic waste stays dangerous forever.
Is a casual way of saying "This remains lethal for 100,000 years. As if that isn't effectively forever given the lifespan of humans and human societies.
This seems relevant to that thought, I think.
> Microbial degradation of DDT and its residues—A review
Excerpt:
Early investigations on the fate of DDT in rodents demonstrated that the indigenous microflora of animals were responsible for the conversion of DDT to DDD (Barker et al. 1965; Mendel & Walton 1966). Since then a number of microbes have been shown to be capable of converting DDT to DDD in pure culture. These include the bacteria Escherichia coli, Enterobacter aerogenes, Enterobacter cloacae, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Pseudomonas putida. Bacillus sp., "Hydrogenomonas", and the fungi Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Phanerochaete chrysosporium, and Trichoderma viridae...
p.s. here's a great lecture on DDT and history of nerve agents https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7WunS8qCz0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
What do you mean with "inert"? I'm pretty sure most radioactive elements are quite happy to react with other chemicals, like salt water.
Some of the new compounds will be water or fat solvable, and can find it's way in to our food chain. The gasses and particles from the nuclear tests around the world was also fairly localized, and if something was spread, it was diluted in a vast vast amount of air. Still, there was long lasting effects on humans and animals, some of which we are still discovering.
Look at the wiki entry linked above by the OP, most things dumped in the ocean are solid waste.
The look at the environmental impact studies done on the dump sites. They found no or negligible environmental impact. If OP wanted to make an argument against ocean dumping of certain nuclear waste, the wiki articles fails at this, on the contrary, careful reading makes it sound like a really good alternative for certain kinds of waste.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/nuclear-fallout-show...
This is effectively the same mistake as the people back in the day made, thinking that the ocean is so big we cannot impact it.
The half life of many of these materials are very long time and it is extremely ignorant to think that highly radioactive materials won't affect ocean life during that time.
Also, the material may be used as fuel for modern reactors in the future. Now you have dumped a lot of shit that is poision to basically all life which could be used to power society.
Then look at the kind of stuff that they have to bury and store. It's not just the fissile material itself, it's pretty much everything that had to have had contact with it. Wikipedia mentions "steam generators, pumps, lids of reactor pressure vessels" [1] - those seem very reasonable to just dump in the ocean.
I agree that material that can be used as fuel for modern reactors in the future should be kept accessible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
A firecracker can be life-threatening if you clench your hand around it and let it explode. But that only means you shouldn't let it go off in a tight, enclosed volume, close to something vital.
Look at the wiki article, most of the nuclear materials dumped were solid low level waste. That sounds like it can stay on the bottom of the ocean just fine.
I do not know where most people get this mental image of dumping "barrels of waste" - maybe from movies of something. I will admit this is what I imagined in my mind, but it seems not to conform with reality.
2. These containers oxidize and eventually fail, leaking their contents. Some of them are from the 1940s.
3. All sorts of wildlife and humans have been affected. It has most definitely worked its way into the food chain.
Source: https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-coast-ddt-dumping-ground...
[0] https://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/news-photo/in-1945-a-truck...
Because of DDT’s chemical properties it has the tendency to accumulate in animals. As animals lower on the food chain are eaten by other animals higher up, DDT becomes concentrated in the fatty tissues of predators.
DDT was canceled because it persists in the environment, accumulates in fatty tissues, and can cause adverse health effects on wildlife [1][2][3].
Edit: I want to mention again that the company responsible is Montrose Chemical Corporation of California. CEO is Samuel Rotrosen and they have gone to extensive lengths to scrub their Google and online search histories.
[1] Suspended, canceled, and restricted use pesticides; EPA-20T-1002; U. S. Environmental Protection Agency,Office of Pesticide Programs, U. S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1990
[2] https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/ddt-...
” Blood serum levels of DDT and DDE in the U.S. population appear to be five to ten times lower than levels found in smaller studies from the 1970s.”
Exposure to DDT, even with bio accumulation being an issue, is 5-10x lower than 50 years ago. We’re headed in the right direction despite this dumping site.
Analytical chemistry has gotten so good we can detect many chemicals at levels of parts per trillion or better. Well below any biological effect.
And it’s still not like we’ve learned any lesson from that, either. They don’t have to prove what they’re replacing it with is safe, or presumptively handle it like it’s unsafe. In 50 years we will find out that the next PFOA-like or BPA-like compound does the same thing, because it was selected for the same properties that posed the problems in humans in the first place. Until you flip the model on its head and require companies to establish safe handling protocols, biological limits, and appropriate disposal methods in advance, it’s just going to keep happening. But god forbid we tell industry “no”.
Directly to the second place in the "Most polluting countries" award, probably.
TLDR: Those responsible are probably all dead now.
DDT was not banned in the US in 1972. The use of DDT in agricultural applications was banned in the US in 1972. As far as I know, it's still legal to manufacture and still legal to use for mosquito control.
https://www.cdc.gov/biomonitoring/DDT_FactSheet.html
> The United States banned the use of DDT in 1972, but some countries still use the chemical. DDT has also been used in the past for the treatment of lice. It is still in use outside the United States for the control of mosquitoes that spread malaria.
EPA says its use was discontinued (read: cancelled)
https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/ddt-...
> In 1972, EPA issued a cancellation order for DDT based on its adverse environmental effects, such as those to wildlife, as well as its potential human health risks.
"Some uses of DDT continued under the public health exemption. For example, in June 1979, the California Department of Health Services was permitted to use DDT to suppress flea vectors of bubonic plague.[52] DDT continued to be produced in the United States for foreign markets until 1985, when over 300 tons were exported"
The above CDC and EPA citations were clearly over-generalizations, disregarding the public health exemption, since DDT was used legally in the US in 1979.
I'm not sure how late it was specifically used in the US for mosquito control vs. flea control, but as far as I know, the public health exemption still exists (though, I suspect it's nearly impossible to get an EPA permit today). I could very well be wrong, and the public health exemption may no longer exist.
In any case, the claim that it must not have been manufactured legally in the US after 1972 is false. The 1972 ban is less comprehensive than commonly believed.
I'm glad we established that.
It's always a people-problem.
And the sarcophagus was paid for everybody
How does one destroy DDT? Is there any way it can be burned safely?
We should clean this up ASAP, if nothing else, then just to regain moral superiority. I'm sure that broken window theory also applies to dirty water. But I don't want my kids to inherit polluted drinking water.
hahahaha, great stuff
We're also seeing blooms of blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) in remote lakes that are now being linked to widespread glyphosate spraying over young forests.