Winter Quarters Bay - Harbor Pollution

Harbor Pollution

Scientific and support operations at McMurdo Station, beginning with its construction in 1955, have led to severely polluted waters at Winter Quarters Bay. Until 1981, McMurdo Station residents simply towed their garbage out to the sea ice and let nature take its course. The garbage sunk to the sea floor when the ice broke up in the spring, according to news reports.

A 2001 survey of the seabed at Winter Quarters Bay revealed 15 vehicles, 26 shipping containers, and 603 fuel drums, as well as some 1,000 miscellaneous items dumped on an area of some 50 acres (20 hectares). Findings by scuba divers were reported in the State of the Environment Report, a New Zealand sponsored study.

In addition, sediments in the bay are contaminated with PCBs, metals, and hydrocarbon fuels. A January 2005 edition of the Antarctic Sun, a U.S. National Science Foundation publication, noted that a former landfill located on a hill above the bay is considered to have been a primary source of the fuel and PCB contaminants. PCBs, now banned in the United States, were used in electrical and heating systems. A 1990 study found that PCBs in the water were also produced by marine shop wastes and ships pumping their bilges while docked.

The Antarctic Sun quoted a professor of developmental and cancer biology at the University of Auckland as saying "the bay has one of the highest toxic concentrations of any body of water on Earth."