<
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240621-the-robots-hunting-ww2-bombs-in-the-sea>
'A boxy robot crawls across the seabed off northern Germany, reaches through
the murky water with a metal claw, and picks up its target: a rusting grenade,
dumped into the sea after World War Two. Overhead, another robot swims along
the surface, scanning the seabed for more munitions. More robot claws reach
into the water from above, plucking bombs and mines from the sediment.
A pilot project backed by the German government will be deploying these and
other technologies in a bay in the Baltic Sea this summer, to test a fast,
industrial-scale process for clearing dumped munitions that are polluting the
North and Baltic Seas. The project is part of a wider €100m (£84.6m/$106.9m)
programme by the German government that aims to develop a way to safely remove
and destroy munitions littering the German parts of the North and Baltic Seas –
a toxic legacy that amounts to an estimated 1.6 million tonnes of dumped
explosives and weapons.
"The problem is that in every marine area where there was a war, or is a war,
there's munitions in the sea. And when it's there for a long time, it can
release carcinogenic substances" and other toxic materials, says Jens Greinert,
a professor for deep sea monitoring at Christian-Albrecht University in Kiel,
Germany, who works at Geomar Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel and is
one of the scientists supporting the project. This interactive map illustrates
where dumped conventional or chemical munitions have been found.
"These munitions are rusting, and our research has shown that over time,
they're releasing more and more carcinogenic [and other toxic] substances,
traces of which have been found in fish and mussels," Greinert says. "The
longer we wait, the more they're going to rust, and the concentration of
harmful substances in the water is going to rise. So now is the moment to
figure out what to do with this stuff, while the munitions are still intact
enough to be grabbed."'
Via
Fix the News:
<
https://fixthenews.com/good-news-sleeping-sickness-chad-forests-ukraine-amur-leopards-in-siberia/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
