Sub discovers non -exploded Nazi bombs that are teeming with sea life
Navy is flourishing to non -exploded Nazi bombs sitting on the bottom of a German bay. A dive gaser has discovered and even recorded film material from naval esters that crawl over a huge piece of TNT.
The discovery that was unveiled in a study published on Thursday was “one of these rare but remarkable Eureka moments,” said marine biologist Andrey Vedenin to AFP.
The waters off the German coast are estimated to litter with 1.6 million tons of non -exploded ammunition from both world wars.
In October last year, a team of German scientists visited a previously unknown garbage material in the Luebeck Bay of the Baltic Sea and sent an unmanned diver 20 meters to the sea floor.
They were surprised when film material from the submarine showed 10 cruise rocks in the Nazi. Then they were stunned when they saw animals that covered the surface of the bombs.
There were around 40,000 animals per square meter – mainly seaworms – who lived on the ammunition, and the scientists wrote in the magazine Communications Earth & Environment.
This hand out photo of Deepsea Monitoring Group, which was recorded on October 2024 with an unmanned dive cast, shows Seestern (Asteria’s Rubens) on one piece TNT, part of an unexploded cruise from the Nazi era, at the lower Luebeck bay in the German waters of the Baltic Sea. /Credit: Andrey Vedenin/Deepsea surveillance group/AFP via Getty Images
“Despite the potential negative effects of the toxic ammunition connections, underwater pictures show dense populations of algae, hydroids, mussels and other epifauna on the ammunition objects, including mines, torpedo heads, bombs and wooden boxes,” concludes the study.
They also counted three fish species, a crab, marine anemones, a jellyfish called hydroids and many naval stars.
While the animals covered the hard housing of the bombs, they largely avoided the yellow explosive material – with the exception of an instance.
The researchers were amazed to see that more than 40 starfish stacked on an exposed part of TNT.
“It looked really strange,” said Vedenin, a scientist from the German University of Carl von Ossietzky and the main author of the study.
It was unclear, but Vedessin could be theorized that they could eat bacterial films that collect on the corroding TNT.
Living on deadly weapons
The explosive chemicals are very toxic, but the animals seemed to have found a way to live nearby.
Apart from the fatal naval esters, they didn’t seem to behave strange.
“The crabs only sat and picked something with their claws,” said Vedenin.
To find out which bombs they had to do, he went online and found a manual from the Nazi Air Force Air Force, which described and stores V-1 fly bombs. The cruise rocket corresponded exactly to the 10 bombs from the film material.
Vdenin said: “There are some irony” in the discovery that these “things that are supposed to kill everything are now putting on so much life”.
This picture of Andrey Vedenin shows sea creatures that live on explosives in the Baltic Sea in the Second World War. / Credit: Andrey Vedenin / AP
It compares it to the way animals and deer thrive in radioactive areas that were abandoned by people near the place of the core disaster in Chernobyl.
Hard surfaces on the sea floor are important for sea life that want more than mud and sand.
Once the animals flocked into huge boulders that left the Baltic Sea, but people removed the stones to build infrastructure like roads at the beginning of the 20th century.
So if the Nazi bombs are finally removed from the bay, the researchers demanded that more stones – or concrete structures – be set up to further support the lifespan of the sea.
The scientists also plan to return to the spot next month to set up a time -lapse camera to observe what the navals do next.
Sea life also flourishes in shipwrecks
It is the latest example of wild animals that flourish in dirty locations. Earlier studies have shown that shipwrecks and former weapons complexes are teeming with the biological diversity.
Studies like this are proof of how nature uses human remains and turns the script turning to survive, said the biologist of marine protection David Johnston with Duke University. He ran recently sunken ships in the First World War, which have become habitats for wild animals along the Potomac River in Maryland.
“I think it’s a really cool testimony to the strength of life,” Johnston told The Associated Press.
In a paper published in Bioscience from 2023, it was found that shipwrecks provide important ecological resources for a variety of organisms, from tiny microbes to large sea creatures.
“Small fish and mobile crustaceans are often protected in the columns of the sunken material, and larger bait fish and predators use shipwrecks as feeding reasons and stops, while swimming from one place to the other,” said NOAA, which contributed to carrying out the study.
This year there is a cargo ship on the bottom of the Sea off the Belgian coast was filled with a supply of rare flat oysters to strengthen other types of sea.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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