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Comment by amrb | Hacker News Reader

Why waste time.. when you can sink it in the sea :P

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-sinks-rusting-...

>>"The sinking of the aircraft carrier Sao Paulo throws tons of asbestos, mercury, lead and other highly toxic substances into the seabed," Greenpeace said in a statement. It accused Brazil's Navy of neglecting the protection of the oceans.

>>Greenpeace said the sinking violated the Basel Convention, the London Convention on the prevention of marine pollution, and the Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants.

Because of that?

Apart from liquids that can be pumped out, is there much in terms of environmental hazard on an average ship? Or just a bunch of slowly corroding metal?

The article mentions heavy metals and asbestos, at the minimum.

Is any of that known to leech out to sea water in amounts dangerous to anything, or at least significant relative to natural trace content?

(Pretty sure it doesn't)

Probably not asbestos, but lead and other heavy-metal leaching would probably depend on local water conditions.

Where would these be used in an average ship, or any ship in particular?

Lead is naturally found in sea water within 2-30 ppb.

To raise global lead concentration by 1 ppb you need to dump a few billion tons of lead.

It's often said that solution to pollution is dilution.

Anti-fouling paint used to have a lot of lead in. I think it might be other heavy metals now.

I’m not sure how quickly things diffuse deep in the ocean, but I would guess quite slowly.

We have dunped so much mercury into the ocean, that you can get poisoning if you eat tuna too often

Wrong, it's about the food chain concentrating mostly natural mercury in long-lived predator species.

>Mercury is an element the emissions of which from its natural sources exceed its anthropogenic emissions.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5013138/

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