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of the people charged with taking the containers out to sea. Going out 
to 1,000 fathoms of water did require going a long way and could re- 
quire being out overnight. But if you get out there and the weather is 
down, and it costs money to run the tug out, so you unload the stuff 
ane come on in. The waves took hold of this stuff and worked it in 
shore. 
Further, the California Division of Fish and Game, not being 
satisfied with the specifications of these barrels, made some of them 
up and instrumented them and took them off the coast of California 
and sunk them, and they found that they imploded at about 400 
fathoms. The stuff in the containers was very low-level waste, with a 
half-life of only a matter of maybe a month or so. If they had been 
high-level wastes—some of the high-level wastes may have a half-life 
of many years or 100 years—this stuff would have been put into the 
ocean. 
Someone asked, what about the tides? I assume that you all recog- 
nize the fact that the Gulf Stream rises down in the Gulf of Mexico 
and runs north by beautiful Florida—I have to be very nice to Mr. 
Frey and Mr. Karth because they are on the Committee on Science and 
Astronautics—it rises down there and, as we all learned when we were 
in school, comes up along the coast of the United States and then goes 
over to the North Sea. The heat of the Gulf Stream makes England, 
Treland, and Scotland, and the Scandinavian countries, habitable. 
But it was not until a comparatively short time ago, maybe 30 or 35 
years ago, that they discovered there was a counterstream under the 
Gulf Stream that came back over the same route, only below it. 
One of the things that has always worried me and should worry you 
is that in England they are using a great deal of atomic energy because 
you do not have to depend on oil and a lot of things, but they are 
pumping in some cases fairly high-level atomic wastes into the North 
Sea. I have asked people on the Atomic Eenergy Commission and other 
people, is there any chance of that being caught up in the counter- 
current and brought over as it comes over the great banks of New 
England, ruining all the fisheries and doing more damage than the 
detergents coming down the Mississippi are now doing to the Gulf 
of Mexico? No one will give you an answer. 
I have studied the oceans and bottoms of the oceans. I have some 
relief maps in my office which were given to me when I was chairman 
of the Committee on Oceanography. Perhaps I should have deposited 
them with this committee, but I have held on to them. They show 
water depths of the ocean. For instance, the North Sea as a rule is less 
than 100 fathoms deep, only about 50 fathoms deep, about 300 feet of 
water off the British Isles. It is a great plateau, just as a plateau forms 
the shelf off this country. The deep parts of the ocean are out to sea 
and in certain trenches. They are not so deep in the Atlantic as they 
are in the Pacific Ocean. 
Iam concerned with what they might have found out coming across 
the ocean about pollution of the water. I do not think this is particu- 
larly new. ; 
You have the Sargasso Sea, which we have all learned about, which 
is the breeding ground for a lot of fish. This is the place where they 
gathered a lot of marine life and a lot of seaweed and marine plants, 
