The Big Baltic Bomb Cleanup

By Paul Hockenos.

The ocean became a dumping ground for weapons after Allied forces defeated the Nazis. Now a team of robots and divers are making the Baltic Sea safer.

Aboard the Alkor, a 55-meter oceanographic vessel anchored in the Baltic Sea several kilometers from the German port city of Kiel, engineer Henrik Schönheit grips a joystick-like lever in his fist. He nudges the lever up, and a one-of-a-kind robotic sea crawler about the size of a two-seat golf cart responds, creeping forward along the seafloor on rubber caterpillar tracks 12 meters below the ship. As the crawler inspects Kiel bay’s sandy terrain, a live video stream beams up to a computer screen in a cramped room aboard the ship. The picture is so crystalline that it’s possible to count the tentacles of a translucent jellyfish floating past the camera. A scrum of scientists and technicians ooh and ah as they huddle around the screen, peering over Schönheit’s shoulder.

The bright-yellow robot is the Norppa 300, the newest fabrication of the explosive ordnance disposal company SeaTerra, which operates out of northern Germany. SeaTerra’s cofounder Dieter Guldin rates as one of Europe’s canniest experts for salvaging sunken explosives. Now, after years of experience clearing the seafloor of hazards for commercial operations, and campaigning the German government for large-scale remediation, SeaTerra is one of three companies participating in the first-ever mission to systematically clear munitions off a seafloor in the name of environmental protection. The arduous and exacting process of removing and destroying more than 1.5 million tonnes of volatile munitions from the Baltic and North Sea basins—an area roughly the size of West Virginia—is more urgent by the day: the weapons, which have killed hundreds of people who have come into accidental contact with them in the past, are now corroded. Their casings are breaking apart and releasing carcinogens into the seas.

read more at hakaimagazine.com.