Incredible footage shows massive dump of Second World War munitions discovered in 3,000ft of water off the coast of LA

The eerie relics, including flares and depth charges, were dumped by ships returning to port from the war in the PacificHundreds of thousands of tons of munitions are thought to have been dumped in US waters before the practice was banned by international treaty in 1975 The find came in the same area off the LA coast where thousands of barrels of outlawed DDT pesticide were discovered three years ago

World War II depth charges, smoke floats and munition cases are among the latest eerie relics to be discovered on a deep-water survey ten miles off the coast of LA.

High–resolution cameras found a massive dumping ground of munitions from the Pacific War which were tossed overboard warships before they could endanger the ports they were returning to.

A team from the University of California’s San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography found the objects up to 3,000ft down between LA and Catalina Island, in the same area where thousands of barrels of the outlawed pesticide DDT were discovered three years ago.

‘We started to find the same objects by the dozens, if not hundreds, consistently, it actually took a few days to really understand what we were seeing on the seabed,’ said expedition leader Eric Terrill.

‘Who knew that right in our backyard, the more you look, the more you find.’

A well-preserved Smoke Float Mark 1 which used white phosphorous or other reactive chemicals to identify or conceal a ship’s position

Expedition leader Eric Terrill of the UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography

The latest discoveries were found across a 135 square mile survey field, and included Hedgehog and Mark 9 depth charges which were typically used by the US Navy to attack enemy submarines.

Also spotted were Mark 1 smoke floats which used white phosphorous or other reactive chemicals to identify or conceal a ship’s position.

Dumping munitions at sea was outlawed by international treaty in 1975, and a Congressional investigation identified 32 instances of it by the US military in American waters between 1918 and 1970.

But hundreds of thousands of tons of mustard gas along with compounds including Adamsite, Lewisite and Tabun are thought to have been tossed overboard with no record between the 1940s and 1960s.

The US Navy, which worked with the Scripps team admitted the discoveries ‘are likely a result of World War II-era disposal practices’.

‘Disposal of munitions at sea at this location was approved at that time to ensure safe disposal when naval vessels returned to US port,’ it said in a statement.

‘We are determining the best path forward to ensure that the risk to human health and the environment is managed appropriately.’

But scientists are still trying to work out what to do with up to half-a-million barrels of DDT thought to be lying in the same waters.

Many of the military objects were hard to recognize after eight decades under water

Little is left of this wooden munitions box which was likely tossed overboard with its contents

Hedgehog depth charges have assumed the appearance of strange sea creatures

And a barnacle-encrusted Depth Charge Mark 9 shows little sign of its origin as a deadly bomb

The survey built on 2021 sea floor search which found thousands of barrels of deadly DDT

Researchers mapped more than 36,000 acres of seafloor after the first barrels were found in 2011 positively identifying another 27,000.

But analysis of dumping records stretching back to the 1930s suggest there could be 20 times as many still unaccounted for.

And two years ago the Environmental Protection Agency concluded that much of the notorious ‘forever chemical’ may have been just emptied straight into the sea from tankers.

‘When the deepwater dumping was first uncovered in more detail by the team at UC Santa Barbara, the response was, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is the tip of the iceberg’,’ Mark Gold of the Natural Resources Defense Council told the LA Times.

‘And now we still don’t even know how big it is.

‘What’s scary — as if we needed it to be more scary — is that we’re now up to more than 100 square miles of contamination from this dumpsite, with high DDT concentrations at depths that nobody’s even ever looked before, and now we’re seeing all the other stuff that was dumped as well.

‘And it’s only what we see, from the standpoint of big munitions, as opposed to: How do we know there weren’t other chemicals that were dumped by the Department of Defense?’

DDT was once hailed as a wonder pesticide after saving crops and fighting off malaria but it was banned in the US in 1972 after it was linked to cancer and threatened wildlife.

The largest DDT producer in the US, Montrose Chemical Corp, was one of the companies stationed on the border of Los Angeles and Torrance and was dumping waste between the 1940s and 1970s.

A $140million legal battle in the 1990s exposed it and three other companies for their disposal of toxic waste through sewage pipes heading to the sea.

The 27,345 ‘barrel-like’ images, some of which were leaking and corroding, were captured by a team from Scripps on board the Sally Ride research vessel.

Regulators said in the 1980s that barrels were deliberately punctured when they were too buoyant to sink, sending the toxic chemicals spewing into the sea inhabited by diverse marine life.

DDT in the region has been found in dolphins, linked to aggressive cancer in 25 per cent sea lions and entered the food chain endangering sea birds, even causing reproductive issues in bald eagles because the chemical caused egg shells to break.

Marine scientists found at least 25,000 barrels of toxic pesticide DDT dumped off the Southern Carolina coast. Pictured: a leaking barrel on the seafloor found in 2011

In the first underwater research carried out in 2011, the autonomous vehicle Sentry (top right) mapped out the seafloor while the remote operated Jason (left) collected samples

Terrill prepares Remote Environmental Monitoring UnitS (REMUS). The robot subs come equipped with sonar tech that collects data from the ocean floor

It has long been suspected that the site by Catalina Island has been a massive underwater toxic waste zone dating back to World War II. Pictured: a barrel found in 2011

About 60 barrels were identified in the first round of research carried out between 2011 and 2013. Pictured: a robot collects samples from the ocean floor in 2011

DDT in the region has been found in dolphins, linked to aggressive cancer in 25 per cent sea lions and entered the food chain endangering sea birds, even causing reproductive issues in bald eagles because the chemical caused egg shells to break

Historical shipping logs show that industrial companies in Southern California used the basin as a dumping ground until 1972, when the Marine Protection, Research and Sanctuaries Act, also known as the Ocean Dumping Act, was enacted.

Dumped munitions routinely find their way back on shore as beachgoers in nearby Santa Cruz County were alarmed to discover when a Mk15 Mod 2 practice bomb washed up on New Year’s Eve.

But the latest scan of the ocean floor did at least provide a more welcome discovery for scientists who spotted up to 60 whale skeletons, more than doubling the number of ‘whale falls’ previously identified.

‘When we do population-level calculations, we estimate there may be on the order of 600,000 or more whale falls in the global ocean, but they fall more or less randomly, so they’re hard to find,’ said Professor Craig Smith at the University of Hawaii.