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 Historical contamination continues to pose a serious ecological threat to many ecosystems across the world. Marine sediments have long acted as sinks for contaminants from surrounding industry and urbanization, and sediment‐bound contaminants are known to affect the ecology of sediment infauna. When sediments are disturbed, however, contaminants are resuspended and potentially released into the water‐column and dispersed to other environments. The threat posed by the resuspension of contaminated sediments has been a focus of substantial research in the geochemical and ecotoxicology fields, yet to date there has been no ecological assessment of the impacts of a real‐world resuspension event involving contaminated sediments.

 We assessed the ecological threat posed by the resuspension of contaminated sediments by testing for impacts of a major dredging operation in an estuary with …