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The big Baltic bomb cleanup
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.
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. SeaTerra’s top technicians aboard the Alkor are testing the Norppa 300’s basic functions in the wild prior to the project’s start this month, in early September 2024: ensuring that its steering, sonar imaging of the seafloor, chemical sampler, and video feed are fine-tuned. Toxicologist Jennifer Strehse, from the Kiel-based Institute of Toxicology and Pharmacology for Natural Scientists, which identified the mounting toxic pollution, says that contamination is particularly widespread in shellfish, bottom-dwelling flatfish, and other fauna that are close to the munition dumps.
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