UC San Diego: UC San Diego Receives $7.35 Million in Federal Community Project Funding
UC San Diego will receive $7.35 million in Community Project Funding as part of an appropriations bill approved by Congress on March 12. The one-time community project funds came at the request of California’s Senators and Members of the San Diego congressional delegation, and are designed to provide critical infrastructure, health and human services, and research resources to help the region continue on its path to post-pandemic recovery.
The funds are part of more than $100 million dollars in community project funding awarded to the San Diego region following requests from Senators Dianne Feinstein, Alex Padilla and Congressmembers Scott Peters, Juan Vargas, Mike Levin, and Sara Jacobs.
“The award of these community project funds represents important recognition and support for the cutting-edge and vital work taking place at UC San Diego every day,” said Pradeep K. Khosla, chancellor, UC San Diego. “From researching complex environmental issues to developing technology that will enable more and better access to our world-class patient care, our world-renowned teams will be able to continue to work toward discovery of solutions that deliver meaningful impacts for our community.”
UC San Diego projects approved for community funding include:
Southern California DDT ocean dumpsite characterization, monitoring, and research – $5.6 million
Requested by Senators Feinstein and Padilla
In 2020, news reports reignited concern about a coastal dumpsite off the coast of Los Angeles known to historically have been a dumping ground for the pesticide DDT and other industrial waste. An expedition led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego in March 2021 mapped a portion of one of two known dumpsites and identified an excess of 27,000 targets with high confidence to be classified as a barrel. Seafloor samples of animals, microbes and sediments were subsequently collected around DDT waste barrels in Aug. 2021 on another Scripps expedition aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Research Vessel Falkor. The new funding will enable an interdisciplinary assessment of the full extent and scope of contaminant impacts, and begin assessing potential bioremediation mitigation strategies.
The $5.6 million in funding will be used to analyze the 2021 samples and for expanded surveys of Dumpsite 1 and 2 with remotely operated vehicles and autonomous underwater vehicles to characterize the dumpsites, assess the condition of the waste containment, and support the collection of data that would help understand biological and physical processes which might transport sediment and contaminants on the deep ocean seafloor.
Additionally, previous research suggests that the contaminants at the deep dumpsites have a distinct chemical fingerprint that could be traced into the marine food web including into marine mammals. With this funding, chemical and biological oceanographers at Scripps Oceanography, collaborating with San Diego State University, will analyze existing samples to fingerprint the unique chemistry of these sediments and assess DDT uptake, accumulation, and trophic transfer. Microbiologists will analyze samples collected in prior expeditions to assess the roles of microbes in degrading DDT and explore microbiological remediation strategies.
Scripps scientists also plan to work on assessing fisheries and ecosystem impacts by measuring toxin levels in preserved marine animals in the Scripps Institution of Oceanography collection, dating back to the 1930s, prior to the known dumping.
“The discovery of the coastal dumpsite has raised a lot of questions about the nature of the contents, their condition and how to mitigate this issue off our coast,” said Margaret Leinen, vice chancellor for marine sciences at UC San Diego and director of Scripps. “I appreciate our elected representatives’ confidence in this interdisciplinary group of Scripps Oceanography scientists to work to better understand the scope of the dumpsite, and develop strategies to monitor impacts and assess potential solutions.”