There is an obstacle, deep in the water, that adds complexity to Germany’s efforts to get rid of the vast network of pipes flowing Russian gas into it: more than a million tons of weapons and bombs raising rust in the depths of the sea.
The German government plans to build three liquefied natural gas terminals along the northern coast in order to end its dependence on Russian energy as the war in Ukraine continues. The idea is to send the gas from the US, Canada, or Qatar instead, and diversify Germany’s energy sources while Moscow plays with interrupting shipping continuity, thus squeezing out German factories and the rest of the country’s economy.
But before the terminals can start receiving shipments, experts like Dieter Goldin and his company SeaTerra will have to find and dispose of all the ammunition that did not explode during World War II, around the sites designated for the gas terminals. Apparently this is a large quantity.
“We found something,” Goldin said as the sailor visited from the pier to a bomb disposal platform set up deeper in the sea. “It’s probably just junk. But we have to get rid of every piece of metal we find, because it could be a bomb.”
In many parts of Europe, World War II traces of fallen bombs still remain, but the problem is particularly severe in Germany, where an estimated 1.6 million tonnes of weapons and bombs were thrown into the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. The majority was buried there after the war, when commanders of the Allied armies ordered the destruction of Germany’s stockpile of weapons. Now this ammunition, from large grenades fired from cannons to torpedo missiles and naval mines, is hampering new development initiatives, including an initiative to develop a wind energy farm at sea.
One project, the Rifgat wind farm set up by TenneT TSO, began operating a year late in 2014, after 30 tons of World War II ammunition were evacuated to lay the cable that connects the turbines to the power grid on land.
“We’m talking about a ticking time bomb”
The problem becomes more urgent as Germany moves to a more diverse mix of energy sources, and this has created a business opportunity for professional bomb dispensers.
“We’re talking about a ticking time bomb,” said Jan Wendt, CEO and founder of north.io, a technology company that develops solutions for mapping lost ammunition on the ocean floor.
One of the proposed sites for liquefied natural gas terminals is Minsner Og, the first in a chain of Parisian islands that span the northern coast of Germany west of Wilhelmsen, where the country has the largest naval base and a small commercial port.
It is estimated that there are 10,000 tons of old ammunition in the waters of the area. To reach the site intended for the construction of the gas terminal, ships have to make a sharp turn to the right in a narrow passage to bypass an ammunition landfill site. The presence of underwater bombs has already delayed a plan that existed before the outbreak of the war between Russia and Ukraine to expand the shipping lane there.
“Before the area’s shipping lane can be widened and leveled, the old bombs must be removed,” said Marcus Greenwald, who is leading the effort by the Department of Shipping and Waterways to clear the area of ammunition. The serious danger, he said, is essentially that a ship will deviate from its course and lower an anchor, and accidentally detonate one of the bombs.
Recent findings suggest that closer to there, near the Hawkskill Strait south of Minsner Ogg and closer to the port of Wilhelmsenhaven, there is a much larger landfill site.
“There are probably 300,000 tons of ammunition 3 or 4 miles from Wilhelmshaven, a really large concentration,” said Eva Wickert, a military historian advising the state of Schleswig-Holstein and the Helsinki Commission, a group of Baltic states working to improve the environment in the Baltic Sea. “No one knows for sure” how many bombs are there, he said.
Wickert relies on British Army archives and local records of the port. The British controlled the northern ports after the war and initiated much of the effort to get rid of ammunition depots at sea.
Not all of the dumped ammunition can be located
But while the largest landfill sites are recognized and vessels are not allowed to sail over them, there is little record of other places where ammunition has been dumped. Allied commanders sometimes paid German fishermen to haul weapons to landfills. Because they were paid by cargo, many of the fishermen got rid of the cargo in random places at sea so they could hurry up and get more cargo, according to transcripts of government interviews with fishermen in 1970.
A fisherman who transferred three shipments of weapons from Flensburg to the mouth of the Kleine Ballet (“small belt”) near the border between Germany and Denmark said they were simply thrown overboard on the way to the belt and back, according to a transcript of an interview with a government official dated 14 September 1970.
By using these sources, the German authorities were able to locate ammunition planted under the supervision of Western allies, but there are gaps. There is no reliable information about weapons or ammunition the former Soviet Union may have thrown into the waters of the Baltic Sea.
The Council for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Region (Helcom) has been working for years to unite all the Baltic states in cooperating in an effort to clean up the sea, including old ammunition. The group stopped meeting officially in February, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
To this day, finding and removing ammunition has been exhausting. Often, after scanning equipment has detected objects suspected of being bombs, a diver is sent down to locate and identify them, and determine if they are stable enough to be removed. In some cases, the ammunition is blown up at the site, which eliminates the danger of an unexpected explosion in the future but involves the risk of creating pollution in the seawater.
Toxins in mollusks and danger to the fish population
A study conducted on Kohlberger Haida, one of the largest landfills in the Baltic Sea, found in mollusks that lived on or close to submerged ammunition toxin concentrations at such high levels that the study’s author, Edmund Mazer, director of the Institute of Toxicology and Pharmacology at Kiel University in Germany, said in a parliamentary hearing May be carcinogenic and should not be eaten.
Abandoned ammunition could also affect the amount of fish, Mazer said. Fish like to find structures in the open water and there they often lay eggs. The spaces found in piles of abandoned torpedo missiles or sea mines, and bombs are similar to the openings and crevices in the rocks in the sea. Mazer said his research has shown that the levels of toxins in these sites are so high that they kill the eggs the fish lay there, thus potentially reducing fish populations.
While experts agree that underwater landfills pose a danger to the environment, the urgency with which the issue has been addressed recently stems from the economic risk posed by ancient weapons.
“One big event could shock an entire economic work environment”
Gabriel Felbermeier, president of the Kiel Institute for World Economics, an economic research institute, says up to 15 percent of Germany’s GDP and 3.5 million jobs depend on maritime transport. A serious accident could jeopardize shipping safety in the region, he said.
“One big event could shock an entire economic work environment,” he said. “Clearly, we need public action.”
For the first time ever, the German government has allocated a small budget to create a pilot project to examine the use of modern technology in order to systematically evacuate entire landfills instead of using the partial process operated today.
Goldin from SeaTerra, and competing companies, such as Theyssenkrupp Marine Services, are working on prototypes for a floating detection and removal platform that will remove the ammunition from the seabed and burn it on board. This will be a new way to clear the sites that may speed up the process. The companies say all of this can be done without releasing toxins into the environment.
One of the first sites to test similar technology was probably close to Minsner Og, the first in a chain of islands in East Paris that embraced the north coast of Germany, west of Wilhelmsenhof, home to Germany’s largest naval base and small trading port. The German government intends to support a pilot project where it will examine whether the scale of cleaning efforts can be increased. If the initiative is approved, work will begin by 2024, speeding up the process of removing fallen ammunition from the sea.
Alexander Orlano, Chief Operating Officer at Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems, predicts that one such platform could eliminate three tons of ammunition each day.
“It means it will take 1,000 years to get rid of all the weapons,” he said at a conference in September. “We’ll need 100 of these to deal with it.”