Between the 1930s and 1970s, companies dumped barrels of toxic waste, including DDT, off the coast of Southern California, from Santa Cruz Island south to Mexico.

The revelations came to light several years ago , and since then researchers have been investigating the various sites using remotely operated vehicles thousands of feet beneath the surface.

There have long been questions about a specific subset of barrels that looked like they were surrounded by concrete and white halos. On Tuesday, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with a potential explanation.

They believe that the barrels contained caustic waste so alkaline that it changed the chemistry and the microbial makeup of the or

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