More than 1.6 million tonnes of unexploded weapons litter the North Sea and Baltic Sea. Remote-controlled seabed crawlers and robots with “smart grabbers” are now cleaning up these toxic munitions.
A boxy robot crawls across the seabed off northern Germany, reaches through the murky water with a metal claw, and picks up its target: a rusting grenade, dumped into the sea after World War Two. Overhead, another robot swims along the surface, scanning the seabed for more munitions. More robot claws reach into the water from above, plucking bombs and mines from the sediment.
A pilot project backed by the German government will be deploying these and other technologies in a bay in the Baltic Sea this summer, to test a fast, industrial-scale process for clearing dumped munitions that are polluting the North and Baltic Seas. The project is part of a wider €100m (£84.6m/$106.9m) programme by the German government that aims to develop a way to safely remove and destroy munitions littering the German parts of the North and Baltic Seas – a toxic legacy that amounts to an estimated 1.6 million tonnes of dumped explosives and weapons.
“The problem is that in every marine area where there was a war, or is a war, there’s munitions in the sea. And when it’s there for a long time, it can release carcinogenic substances” and other toxic materials, says Jens Greinert, a professor for deep sea monitoring at Christian-Albrecht University in Kiel, Germany, who works at Geomar Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel and is one of the scientists supporting the project. This interactive map illustrates where dumped conventional or chemical munitions have been found.
Recent Comments