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Apart from liquids that can be pumped out, is there much in terms of environmental hazard on an average ship? Or just a bunch of slowly corroding metal?

• woodruffw 4y ago
  The article mentions heavy metals and asbestos, at the minimum.
  • jojobas 4y ago
    Is any of that known to leech out to sea water in amounts dangerous to anything, or at least significant relative to natural trace content? (Pretty sure it doesn't)
    • woodruffw 4y ago
      Probably not asbestos, but lead and other heavy-metal leaching would probably depend on local water conditions.
      • jojobas 4y ago
        Where would these be used in an average ship, or any ship in particular? Lead is naturally found in sea water within 2-30 ppb. To raise global lead concentration by 1 ppb you need to dump a few billion tons of lead. It's often said that solution to pollution is dilution.
        • dan-robertson 4y ago
          Anti-fouling paint used to have a lot of lead in. I think it might be other heavy metals now. I’m not sure how quickly things diffuse deep in the ocean, but I would guess quite slowly.
        • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
          We have dunped so much mercury into the ocean, that you can get poisoning if you eat tuna too often
          • jojobas 4y ago
            Wrong, it's about the food chain concentrating mostly natural mercury in long-lived predator species. >Mercury is an element the emissions of which from its natural sources exceed its anthropogenic emissions. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5013138/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5013138/