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. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

For a long time we thought it was the carcinogenic pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane , commonly known as DDT. We do know this was being dumped here back 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.

A team on board the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Research Vessel Falkor made a huge leap in solving the hal

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