Ghostly Halos Found Around Toxic Barrels Off L.A. Coast

From the 1930s to the 1970s, barrels amounting to thousands of tons of chemicals were dumped off the coast of Los Angeles. It was an assault on the environment that would continue to unfold for decades to come, and worse still, we weren’t even sure what was inside the barrels.

For a long time we thought it was the carcinogenic pesticide Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly known as DDT. We do know this was being released into the environment in the mid-1900s, but when strange ghostly halos started forming around the barrels, it started to look as if we were dealing with something else.

Testing samples from the mysterious halos revealed a staggering pH of 12. On the pH scale, anything above 7 is considered alkaline, so the team realized that what they were looking at what the result of some kind of highly caustic alkaline waste, not DDT.

Read more: https://www.iflscience.com/strange-ha...
Video credit: Schmidt Ocean Institute