Sunken warships pollute ocean

In 2005, the USS America aircraft carrier was towed out to sea on her final voyage. Hundreds of miles (kilometers) off the Atlantic coast, U.S. Navy personnel blasted the 40-year-old warship with missiles and bombs until it sank.

The massive Kitty-Hawk class carrier — more than three football fields long — came to rest in the briny depths about 300 nautical miles (550 kilometers) southeast of Norfolk, Virginia.

Target practice is now how the Navy gets rid of most of its old ships, an Associated Press review of Navy records for the past dozen years has found. And they wind up at the bottom of the ocean, bringing with them amounts of toxic waste that are only estimated.