Since gas leaks were detected on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines in Danish territorial waters, fears of an environmental catastrophe have been mounting, especially since the underwater pipes are not equipped with valves. or other mechanisms that would stop the incident.
Nevertheless, a spokesperson for the German Environment Ministry wants to be reassuring. quoted by German wave, he assures : “According to our information, at this stage, leaks from the Nord Stream gas pipelines do not pose any serious risk to the ecosystem of the Baltic Sea.”
“I assume that the ecological repercussions will be very limited compared to the scale of the incidents, in particular because they will have been very punctual”, confirm in Of the Spiegel Gregor Rehder, biogeochemist at the University of Rostock and deputy head of the marine chemistry section at the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research in Warnemünde (IOW).
There is however “a lot of uncertainties” surrounding these leaks, emphasizes in The Guardian Jasmin Cooper, researcher in the department of chemical engineering at Imperial College London. Beyond the causes that caused them, what we do not know is the precise quantity of gas likely to escape.
Although Nord Stream 1 and 2 were not operational, they still contained natural gas, the main component of which is methane, a powerful greenhouse gas (GHG) whose warming potential is significantly greater than that of di