If you are interested in working in ocean research to explore, understand, and protect the ocean, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is hiring. https://careers.whoi.edu
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 :)
Would a curious, wannabe scientist be welcome at the Research Center as a visitor? Is there anything I could actually help with/volunteer on while there?
Do you mean at Woodwell Climate Center (woodwellclimate.org), formerly the Woods Hole Research Center? If so, I'm not sure. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI.edu) is nearby but unrelated.
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].
The cape is a fine place to visit and a terrible place to live. The whole place is a "quaintness facade" put on to part tourists from their money. It's fine for a week or for a summer but living it grates on you.
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.
It is like any resort / vacation area. There are lots of jobs in food services and the trades - nearly all of the properties are single families and they have to survive beach climate, wind, and the occasional hurricane.
The Cape has a lot more unique stuff than the average vacation region, as you can see Woods Hole is there.
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.
Cape Codder / tech biz owner here. I guess that makes me the one who fleeces the businesses that fleece the tourists? You're mostly right, but obviously seriously jaded/bitter. Real estate is expensive, the business economy revolves around tourism and the population is aging. That doesn't mean we're just giving up though, so please if you're young and have the income to support a life here please do so! We need more young people willing to fight for the future of the Cape!
I am curious why you think anyone not set to inherit a business would not be better off pursuing opportunity elsewhere.
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".
As someone who is, unfortunately, in a lower earning portion of the US,
> 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?
Did I say "the Cape is a great place to live! no problems here! move here!"? No. I agreed with the fundamental problems the Cape faces, and am asking for others to help change/stop these issues. Fighting for affordable housing, advocating for good schools, supporting non-tourism based business... there are countless other causes. My point was that "I'm not going down without a fight" and we need help, because we're losing the war for the Cape, and the future is bleak if "good men do nothing". No one is asking to be handed anything, I'm asking YOU and others to fight for a robust and thriving community.
I can't believe I'm defending "advocating for the Cape" on Hacker News of all places.
fwiw i love cape cod and the islands and hope you can figure out a way to fight for those things. i spent a lot of time on martha's vineyard growing up and it was always so sad to hear islanders talk about their kids leaving for better opportunities.
Hey thanks. I have kids and talk to them openly about the problems with the Cape, and how they might find more opportunity elsewhere. Like most kids they love their home, but fully recognize that housing costs, and career opportunities are limited.
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.
My wife and I lived in many places throughout the US.
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.
Woods Hole isn't like most of the cape, though. It's got a different culture, it's geographically very much on the edge of it, the landscape is super different than the gentle beaches you get on most of the cape, pretty close to Boston relative to other spots, etc. I would agree that many parts of the cape fit your critique though.
The opportunities are occasionally remote as in "on a research vessel somewhere in the middle of the ocean for several weeks." But virtually everyone has a home base near the campus. The nature of the work is very hands-on, even for software.
Edit: As pointed out below, there are some remote software developer roles right now.
Interesting this is listed as a requirement for Senior Software Engineer:
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.
We're not very well-equipped to handle volunteers right now, but we are releasing more data and open source software every day, and would be happy to see contributions from the community.
We have a GitHub for the institution (https://github.com/whoigit/) and some individual labs have separate GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab accounts. For instance, some of the robotics code behind the AUV Sentry is here: https://bitbucket.org/whoidsl/
You would need to add some insurance in that volunteering plan. Doing field work in the ocean is hard and dangerous. For they would be a risk to be sued.
... 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.
Also the very vocal anti-environmentalist company CEO Samuel Rotrosen is barely mentioned. Montrose executives were basically exaggerated movie villains in their defense of dumping DDT. Unapologetic doesn’t begin to cover it.
I've tried googling for Samuel Rotrosen, but came up with almost nothing. If I had to guess, then someone payed (a lot of) money to scrub this name off the internet. It's pretty creepy, but also impressive what you can do if you're determined.
This guy had an article posted in the New York Times in 1972...I am pretty confident he was not scrubbed from the internet and was instead just dead before the internet and no one has cared enough about him to add much content. Note that the New York Times article was the first search returned on Google for me, so not very hidden.
> “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
On the company wiki page it says: "In December 2000, the Montrose Chemical Corporation of California and three other corporations settled their lawsuits for a collective $73 million."
And as usual for HN you are being unhelpfully reductive to up push the "capital bad boo hoo, something something".
Just like with the soviet destruction of Aral sea to produce cash crops, in turn sacrificing 14% of its fish stock, it's usually short sight political decisions.
The politician needs to look successful today and no one will pin the consequences on them in 10 to 15 years time.
There are systemic issues and most of comes from these politicians that are driven primarily by their own ambition rather than the corporation of all concerned to bring quality outcomes.
I can see an argument for this in any particular case. But then I think about the makeup of the US prison population and realize that I'm correct. You only go to jail for certain crimes in this country (not that I think we need to increase our prison population). You don't get peppered sprayed, tasered or shot for environmental crimes. Protesting environmental crimes? Absolutely!
> Just like with the soviet destruction of Aral sea to produce cash crops, in turn sacrificing 14% of its fish stock, it's usually short sight political decisions.
I would agree that short-sighted political decisions maintain the lack of enforcement of certain crimes. "Broken windows" justice is waaay easier. But the article and my comments were about the US, where capital rules. And you have to take the history of the justice system into account, and in the US you find it's intertwined with the plantation system, slavery, destroying labor unions, "protecting" against Native Americans and, more recently, the Post WWII corporate boom (contributing to corporate power). I'm not familiar enough Soviet history to say if any of this is relevant to your example.
The system is built to protect the system. It only protects capital so much as the state has a vested interest in the stability of any particular grouping of capital.
Agreed, but there's been a major project since 1968 to ensure that capital generally is big enough that it's more important to protect its interests than poor people's. That's the entire purpose of the Federalist Society and fusionism. That's why Donald Trump was actually in a way the most establishment candidate in 2016, he was the first to recognize that traditional fusionism is dead with declining religiosity in the US, now instead of the religious right/libertarian fusion you have the white grievance/nationalist/libertarian fusion instead. Unfortunately, the new fusion is essentially proto-fascism.
Except for hundreds of federal and state agencies designed to protect people, ecology, wetlands, water, roads, schools, fraud, crime, murder, and.... well, pretty much everything.
Except you know the whole we've known for decades that it's there and done nothing.
Beyond that we have 1344 superfund sites, most created by private industry, now the government responsibility only very little is being done with that either...
They don't know how much of this is DDT but they have reason to believe there is a lot of DDT out there and the stability of the chemical is a big issue for cleanup efforts. From the article:
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.
Yes, bacterial degradation is a thing, and a great idea.The problem with any degradation process: ozone, hydrogen peroxide, bacteria, can lead to intermediate or final forms of chemicals that are even worse (more toxic.) Organochlorine chemistry is complicated. The by products are even more complex. And then each of those reactions) effects on the environment are complex.
One of the best places to put something at risk is deep in the water, hence deep tailing ponds for acid mine waste, to stop there Oxidation processes. For example surface rust on a car can prevent deeper rust, by creating a non reactive layer.
But this is a huge problem! Thousands of barrels, probably other compounds equally or more vicious.
The only known way of complete destruction is controlled high temperature incineration - which is expensive, and only certain sites certified to do it.(>1850°C) And of course transport risky. (And if you don't keep control of combustion, then more dangerous side products in the air.)
So, for now, best to keep it there, until a complete plan is made. Moving it, touching it, without a that plan, could make it much worse, by mobilising it, exposing to water flows, disseminating it, making it accessible to animals.
Quite possibly might be best to bury everything. A horrible thought, but may be the best. It's 3000 meters down!
(And this isn't even radioactive!)
Just for clarity: not a chemist, but an environmental engineer.
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.
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...
Good work. When they're done mapping the DDT, they should hunt down the barrels of nuclear waste. Ocean-dumped by 13 countries, from 1946 through 1993. A total of 85,000 TBq (85x10^15 Bq) at over 100 ocean sites.
Ready to get crucified for this but... what is the problem with dumping nuclear waste in the ocean? If you just throw, for example, radioactive hunks of metal in the ocean, they are inert, stay in relatively dead zones of the world, they do not leech too much and the parts that _would_ leech would just be really insignificant when diluted in the vast vast amount of water of the oceans.
The was exactly the argument for dumping nuclear waste in the ocean originally. That was until the places they once thought were dead zones are teeming with life.
I'm not a chemist nor physicist nor biologist, but..
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.
I mean inert in both the physical sense - they do not move and the chemical sense - sure, metal rusts but the rate is really really slow compared to the liquid dispersion.
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.
Because what you think is true today may not be true tomorrow. You don't know how it affects the ocean or the life there and the ripple effect it may have on the ecosystem.
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.
Materials with high radioactivity have a short half life and materials with low radioactivity have a long half life. So that makes the problem a bit better.
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.
barrels have a habit of dissolving in salt water, and in germany, where barrels were dumped underwater in an old salt mine, the radioactive material ended up in the ground water.
The problem here was obviously dumping the barrels in an old salt mine.
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.
How about the barrels and shells filled with chemical weapons dumped in the Baltic Sea? This being a sea, all that munition has a good chance of making a big chunk of Europe very sad at some point in the near future.
This is incredibly depressing. It sounds like the chemicals may have been impacting some sea life, but who knows how many humans have been impacted in that area of LA. I can't even imagine how much the clean up will cost.
1) That means those are probably just empty containers at this point due to diffusion. The DDT is already in the environment and has been for decades.
2) Those ones are the dangerous ones right now. And moving them risks massive immediate releases. Making this cleanup process entirely terrible...
3) Yep! And has done so for decades now
Your statement reminds me of this quote from the sketch from Dave & Clarke about "The Front Fell Off.": "We towed it beyond the environment. There's nothing out there; but sea and birds and fish, and 20 thousand tons of crude oil, and the front off the ship that fell off."
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
” 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.
And this is in a country that has learned it's lessons, and gradually, actually cares. Think of all the other places in the world with sites like this.
We haven’t learned our lesson though. We went on and kept doing the same thing with Teflon, PFAS/firefighting foams, and endocrine-disrupting plasticizers like BPA.
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”.
Dumping coal ash by deliberately storing it improperly and waiting for a natural disaster is still a common practice. We are dealing with this plus genx dumping in north carolina. No person actually responsible will be punished. Even if a corporate citizen is held liable, they will just declare bankruptcy and leave taxpayers with the bill as usual.
Sadly they wont be prosecuted as most of them will be dead from age. Same goes for what Monsanto has done and others are doing right now knowingly poisoning future generations.
Prosecuted for what? Not only was it legal back then it was generally recognized as the best method of disposal. Plus as others have pointed out nearly everyone involved is dead by now.
Considering DDT was banned in 1972... any suits who were alive during its production and would be behind the decision to dump all of this stuff out into the sea, assuming a median age of 40, would be 89 years old today.
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.
> 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)
> 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.
This is how industrial capitalism is profitable: by socializing the cost of its pollution. If chemical companies had to pay for their damage they wouldn’t exist
Chemical companies would still exist, they would just be less profitable and their produce would be more expensive if the social costs were fully internalized (as they should be and currently aren't).
Is the mass amount of pollution that will infect animals through our food chain and lead to many animals and humans lives being stunted for centuries worth it? Just because a chemical is a solution to a problem doesnt absolve it from the numerous other problems it creates for centuries after
You say that like socialized industries haven't had just as large of disasters, or that on net DDT has been bad for the US/world. Everything is a tradeoff - how many kids with malaria is a bald eagle worth?
Malaria hasn’t been endemic here for probably 100 years. We poisoned eagles because it was cheap and legal to dump into the ocean. How is there a tradeoff?
I tried to find if there are any concrete ideas how to clean this mess. Can anyone point me to research on how these deep sea barrels can be lifted back and properly handled?
How does one destroy DDT? Is there any way it can be burned safely?
Yes. Can burn. Need an approved controlled hazardous waste incinerator. Need a temperature of at least 1850°C ! There are facilities, search on EPA. But that's a huge amount of barrels down there. And still counting. And it is extremely deep. Best to leave it there, don't disturb, until a complete plan in place. Even then , complete burial is likely a valid solution . Unfortunately.
I think it's DDT waste, not DDT itself. I think at this stage they are trying to figure out what exactly is there and how many barrels, once they do - they will decide what to do with them.
Probably depends on how many of the barrels are intact enough to move. If they have all rusted open, there may not be anything to clean up, as the waste will have diffused into the water. Steel barrels, even if painted, will rust quickly in salt water. At that depth though, I don't know.
There is no mention of the companies involved. That would be almost impossible to track because those companies no longer exist and their operations ceased a long time ago as they have been bought and sold many times. https://www.icis.com/explore/resources/news/2000/12/20/12916...
Truck load after truck load of 44gal drums of PCB based transformer oil was dumped off a jetty in South Fremantle Western Australia, not even offshore..
I always hate reading this kind of news, because it severely undermines our ability to scold and punish others for dropping their trash into the oceans.
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.
i totally agree, but realistically it will be very difficult and expensive to retrieve an estimated 500.000 barrels from ~3.000 feet depth. most likely there will be years if not decades of discussion who and how this will be cleaned.
Yet another reason why we have to be very careful about eating seafood. It's at the place now where the sensible thing to do is to avoid it all together.
Not just seafood but fish from remote lakes across the US and Canada which were heavily sprayed with DDT to kill the spruce budworm. This was done up until the early 1980s and now accumulated in lake beds with concerning levels still showing up in fish.
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.
We've known about this environmental catastrophe for decades now. Mind boggling that not a single person from the Montrose Chemical Corporation ever saw prison time.
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...