Aboard one of the most-advanced research ships in the world, on a seemingly unremarkable day, David Valentine decoded unusual signals underwater that gave him chills. As he scanned the seafloor with a deep-sea robot, he came across a trail of eerie-looking barrels that no one had seen before.

He spent years trying to sound the alarm, but calls to the government went nowhere. He finally messaged Rosanna Xia, an environmental reporter at the Los Angeles Times, who unearthed a startling truth: In the years after World War II, as many as half a million barrels of DDT waste (the world’s first “forever chemical”) had been quietly dumped into the ocean.

When Xia published her first article in October 2020, the revelation shook marine scientists and shoved the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency into action. Researchers across California joined the call to arms, and Valentine set sail in search for more answers.

The full environmental horror sharpens into even greater clarity once Xia starts to connect more dots: Sea lions have washed ashore with cancer in staggering numbers, and significant amounts of DDT can still be traced across the entire marine ecosystem. Young women today continue to be haunted by this chemical that seems to know no bounds.

For decades, the ocean had been recklessly poisoned, and people today must live with the consequences. A new generation is now grasping the words of Rachel Carson, who first shook the world awake in 1962 with Silent Spring:

The obligation to endure, Carson wrote, gives us the right to know.