Thousands of barrels with bizarre “white halos” were found deep beneath the U.S. coast near Los Angeles, and scientists are starting to unravel the mystery. A study published Tuesday in the journal PNAS Nexus shows they contain a caustic alkali waste, resulting in the sea floor halos and a concrete-like crust inside the circles. Caustic means it can corrode materials it comes into contact with, and alkali is a substance that reacts with water. When the waste leaked from the barrels, it reacted with the water to form brucite, creating the concrete-like sediment. And as that sediment dissolves, it becomes odd-looking halos around each barrel. The barrels were initially discovered in 2021 in the San Pedro Basin. Researchers were concerned they could possibly contain a pesticide called DDT, which causes negative impacts on the environment and human health, resulting in its 1972 ban. But using a remotely operated submarine vehicle, SuBastian, the scientists were able to collect samples to determine it wasn’t the toxic pesticide. “One of the main waste streams from DDT production was acid and they didn’t put that into barrels,” said lead author Dr. Johanna Gutleben, researcher at University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “It makes you wonder: What was worse than DDT acid waste to deserve being put into barrels?” Between the 1930s and 1970s, thousands of items were dumped legally off the coast of Southern California. And sediments in the area are still heavily contaminated with toxic chemicals, such as DDT. The discovery could assist in mapping the scale of pollution in the area, according to the researcher.
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