World War II Bombs, Torpedoes and Naval Mines: The Way Marine Life Flourishes on Dumped Armaments

In the brackish waters off the Germany's shoreline lies a graveyard of Nazi bombs, torpedo heads and mines. Thrown off barges at the end of the second world war and forgotten about, countless munitions have fused into clusters over the years. They create a rusting layer on the shallow, silty ocean floor of the Lübeck Bay in the western tip of the Baltic.

Over the decades, the explosive stockpile was overlooked and neglected. A growing number of visitors flocked to the sandy beaches and tranquil sea for jetskiing, kiteboarding and amusement parks. Underwater, the munitions decayed.

Researchers expected to see a lifeless zone, with no organisms because it was all contaminated, states the lead researcher.

When the team went searching to see what they were doing to the marine environment, the team expected to see a desert, with no organisms because it was all poisoned, states a scientist.

What they found astonished them. Vedenin remembers his colleagues shouting with surprise when the ROV first transmitted footage. This was a great moment, he says.

Numerous of sea creatures had established habitats among the explosives, developing a renewed marine community more populous than the seabed nearby.

This marine city was testament to the tenacity of marine life. Truly remarkable how much marine organisms we observe in places that are supposed to be dangerous and dangerous, he explains.

In excess of 40 sea stars had piled on to one visible chunk of TNT. They were living on steel casings, detonator compartments and transport cases just a short distance from its dangerous content. Fish, crabs, anemones and bivalves were all discovered on the old munitions. It resembles a reef ecosystem in terms of the abundance of animal life that was there, notes Vedenin.

Surprising Population Density

An mean of more than forty thousand creatures were living on every meter squared of the explosives, researchers wrote in their research on the observation. The adjacent region was much less diverse, with only eight thousand organisms on every square metre.

It is surprising that objects that are meant to destroy everything are hosting so much marine organisms, explains Vedenin. It's evident how nature adjusts after a major disaster such as the second world war and how, in some way, marine life finds its way to the most risky places.

Man-made Structures as Ocean Environments

Man-made constructions such as sunken vessels, offshore windfarms, drilling platforms and pipelines can offer replacements, replacing some of the destroyed habitat. This investigation shows that weapons could be comparably positive – the explosion of life on those in the Bay of Lübeck is likely to be duplicated in other locations.

Between 1946 and the post-war period, 1.6 million tons of arms were disposed of off the German coast. Countless of people loaded them in vessels; a portion were placed in allocated areas, the remainder just dumped while traveling. This is the first time researchers have studied how ocean organisms has adapted.

Global Instances of Marine Transformation

• In the United States, retired drilling platforms have become coral reefs
• Sunken ships from the World War I have become habitats for marine life along the Potomac River in Maryland
• Military vehicle parts that have become habitat to reef-building organisms off Asan in Guam

These locations become even more valuable for marine life as the marine environments are increasingly denuded by commercial fishing, bottom trawling and anchoring. Shipwrecks and munitions areas effectively serve as refuges – they are not national parks, but nearly any kind of anthropogenic disturbance is restricted, states Vedenin. Therefore a lot of marine species that are otherwise scarce or diminishing, such as the cod fish, are flourishing.

Future Factors

Anywhere military conflict has occurred in the past 100 years, adjacent waters are usually strewn with explosives, says Vedenin. Millions of tons of volatile compounds rest in our marine environments.

The positions of these munitions are insufficiently mapped, partly because of national borders, restricted armed forces records and the reality that archives are stored in historic archives. They pose an detonation and safety hazard, as well as threat from the persistent leakage of poisonous compounds.

As Germany and other countries begin extracting these relics, experts hope to preserve the marine communities that have formed in their vicinity. In the Bay of Lübeck weapons are already being extracted.

Researchers recommend substitute these steel remains originating from weapons with some less dangerous, various safe objects, like possibly concrete structures, states Vedenin.

He currently aspires that what occurs in Lübeck establishes a precedent for replacing habitats after weapon clearance in different areas – because including the most damaging explosives can become framework for ocean ecosystems.