Marine Life Found Thriving on WWII Explosives Left in Baltic Sea
- Scott Way
- Sep 30
- 3 min read
Scientists exploring a WWII-era dumpsite in the Baltic Sea made a surprising discovery last week. Marine life is thriving on piles of abandoned ordnance, including unexploded German cruise missiles and other toxic waste.
Using underwater submersibles, the researchers were able to observe crabs, worms, sea anemones, starfish, and even small fish colonizing the surfaces of old warheads, torpedoes, and cruise missiles left at the site off the coast of Germany’s Bay of Lübeck. The ordnance is sitting in only about 20 meters (65 feet) of water.
The location, about 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) off the coast of Boltenhagen, Germany, is well-known to scientists and has been the focus of multiple efforts to remove the toxic ammunition.
“We were prepared to see significantly lower numbers of all kinds of animals," said lead author Andrey Vedenin with the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany according to Yahoo News. “But it turned out the opposite," he added. The research was published Thursday in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.
The most surprising observation is that biodiversity is greater on the munitions than on the surrounding terrain. In fact, scientists observing the phenomenon found tens of thousands of organisms per square meter on the munitions -- mostly worms, mussels, algae, hydroids, crabs, and starfish. The bulk of the sea life stayed on the metal casings of the various ordnance, but in one instance over 40 starfishes were found living on an exposed chunk of TNT.
Researchers even found 10 Nazi-era cruise missiles among the wreckage, according to CBS News. Vedenin, the study's lead author, was able to identify them as German V-1 flying bombs, also known as the Fieseler Fi 103, by comparing them to details found in a Luftwaffe -- the German WWII air force -- manual about how to properly handle and store V-1 materials. The wreckage they discovered matched the storage instructions.
According to Vedenin and his team, there is an estimated 1.5 million metric tonnes of weapons in the area, from both WWI and WWII.
While there's little history of such a phenomenon with marine life happening before, scientists believe the organisms and small invertebrates fixate on the munitions because hard surfaces are a rarity in the Baltic Sea. Typically, the sea bottom is mostly flat and full of mud and sand, with few anchor points for sea life. Most of the available rocks and boulders were fished out of the water for construction purposes in the 1800s and 1900s, leaving only the remaining munitions as a breeding ground.
That dangerous materials, coupled with the tons of steel and other hard surfaces, makes the ordnance attractive real estate for colonizing creatures, even though much of it is toxic, explosive, rusting, and decayed. Even more strangely, scientists speculate that because of the chemical contamination, it may be keeping other creatures (and humans) away, creating an isolated and undisturbed habitat for organisms to flourish without disruption.
However, scientists were keen to point out the situation isn't ideal. All the metal, toxic materials, and explosives are dangerous to the location itself and to the larger marine environment of the Baltic Sea. The team is now looking to examine how much contamination the various organisms living there can absorb, or have already absorbed, and whether they still reproduce healthy offspring. Future plans include using a time-lapse camera to monitor the behavior of the marine wildlife and their reproduction over time.
Since the location has long been known to locals and the German government, the country has already launched a cleanup initiative allocating €100 million to recover and neutralize munitions in the North Sea and Baltic Sea. In the Bay of Lübeck, in particular, robots and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are being used to detect and extract other explosives, with plans to develop floating disposal facilities. The irony in doing so, is that it would remove what appears to be ideal marine habitat. Some scientists have suggested that implanting artificial reefs in place of the ordnance might offer the best compromise.
You can see the some of the ongoing explosive disposal efforts in the video below:
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