Radionuclide transfer into abyssal ecosystems and food webs is uncharacterised
#00119
It is largely unknown how radionuclides from degrading drums (Co-60, Nb-94, Cs-137, Am-241) move into deep-sea sediment, water, and living organisms over decades — and the drums themselves have become hard-substrate habitat, putting fauna in direct contact with the waste.
Parent issue
#00117 Legacy radioactive and hazardous waste deliberately dumped in the deep sea
Sustainable Development Goals
Location
Description
Why this is its own facet
Locating and inspecting drums tells you they are breaching; it does not tell you what the escaping radioactivity does in the environment. The deep ocean was assumed to immobilise these wastes, but the mechanisms of dispersion and transfer — into pore water and the water column, into sediments, and up through benthic and pelagic food webs — have never been measured at these sites over time.
Specific concern
On-site radiometry in 2025–2026 found activity levels higher than expected for the zone, though still limited enough to handle samples safely. That gap between "expected" and "observed" is the core unknown: baseline transfer models were never validated here. Compounding this, the drums act as rare hard substrate on a soft abyssal plain and are colonised by fauna, placing organisms in direct, sustained contact with — or feeding around — a radioactive source, a plausible food-web entry point that has not been quantified.
What a resolution needs to establish
A multi-compartment, repeatable baseline (water, sediment, biota) that can be revisited to detect trends, distinguish dump-derived radionuclides from global fallout markers, and feed transfer models. Without it there is no way to determine whether the site is stable or slowly contaminating the deep-sea food web.
Sub-issues
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