Monday October 28, 2024
Courthouse News Service —
Decades before the pesticide DDT was banned in the United States, it was dumped in the ocean off the coast of Los Angeles. The marine ecosystems are still recovering from it, but new research highlights methods to predict contaminants in fish.
A team of scientists, led by those at the University of California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, researched the lasting impacts of those years of chemical discharge and detailed their findings in a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DDT and other chemicals were dumped offshore with the assumption that the ocean would mitigate its impacts on humans and the environment by diluting and spreading pollutants. The scientists found that the areas near the historical dumping sites still show high DDT concentrations in sediment and in fish.
“The impacts of ocean dumping on marine ecosystems and fisheries resources remain place-based, despite the long-held belief that the vastness of the ocean holds nearly limitless capacity for contaminant mitigation via dilution and advection,” the authors wrote in the study.