424 



We found litter throughout the 2,800-meter site. Here we see a 

 box of munitions, possibly obsolete ammunition. We came across 

 hundreds of these boxes. I think that the "bottom line" to this is 

 that in any future monitoring of disused, multiple-use dumpsites 

 we should be particularly aware of the widespread nature of this 

 ordnance. And that we do nothing about the properties or behavior 

 of most of it. 



I don't think we would want to go out and start bumping around 

 these sonar targets in a submersible; which brings me to another 

 point, the problem of confusion of targets. If you have a dumpsite 

 with multiple-use such a the 2,800-meter Atlantic dumpsite, and 

 you are out in a submersible at 9,000 feet, you are traveling fairly 

 blind. You can't run you external lights coontinuously or you will 

 run down the battery. When the lights are on you can only see in a 

 forward arc about 150° for about 25 to 30 feet. Therefore, your 

 sonar is the only thing that really tells you what is out there 

 ahead. The targets, these munitions drums and explosives, give you 

 the same or similar signals as do the radioactive waste drums. 

 Therefore you don't know whether to avoid the target or not until 

 you are quite close to it. This, then, requires caution and a fairly 

 slow traverse rate. 



While the 3,800-meter dumpsite appeared relatively barren of 

 biological organisms, the 2,800-meter site appeared more biological- 

 ly active. The following six slides are illustrative of some of the 

 more common fish and invertebrates present at the 2,800-meter 

 dumpsite. While the fish are of considerable oceanographic inter- 

 est, they also compound the difficulty of describing potential bio- 

 logical transport mechanisms for radioactivity from a dumpsite. 

 Each of the fish shown may represent part of a separate food chain 

 or components of the same food chain. They may also be present, 

 but as yet unobserved at the 3,800-meter dumpsite. 



Next slide, please. 



(Slide No. 19.) 



