The North Sea has spent about a century being a battleship graveyard, with warships from World War I and World War II turning into involuntary artificial reefs. A lot of those ships are still carrying explosives filled with chemicals that, according to new research, are poisoning all the marine life around them.
A study published in Marine Pollution Bulletin, led by researchers including Aarhus University geoscientist Katrine Juul Andresen, put blue mussels in cages directly on three World War-era wrecks. The mussels basically became aquatic canaries in a coal mine, and the coal mine was filled with century-old bombs
Researchers found traces of TNT in the water and sediment around two of the wrecks. The animals showed signs of cellular damage and their metabolisms appeared disrupted, leading to depleted energy reserves. At one wreck, TNT reached only 72.6 nanograms per liter, an absurdly tiny concentration that still caused measurable biological stress to everything around it.
World War Wrecks Are Quietly Leaking Toxic Chemicals Into the Sea
That’s why this finding is such a big concern. We think of pollution as the horrifying optics of an oil spill. Normally blue oceans are now an unctuous black. Ducks are slicked with oil. That visually dystopian nightmare is at the far end of the scale of how obvious pollution’s toll is. These wrecks aren’t turning the surrounding water into a glowing neon green horror movie lagoon from which flesh-eating mutants are born.
Everything seems perfectly normal to the naked eye, but that little tiny leak slowly wrecks an ecosystem — and there is a lot of ammunition left over to leak.
Scientists estimate that roughly 1.6 million tons of conventional munitions are still hanging out in German waters alone, while hundreds of military wrecks are scattered across the North Sea and Baltic region. Salty seawater will keep eating through all those steel hulls and weapon casings, leaking, and cleanup isn’t such a simple process.
It’s dangerous and expensive. But before such drastic costs and measures are considered, it’s probably best to get a sense of just how much danger these wrecks pose and, more specifically, figure out which wrecks pose the greatest threat to their environments.
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