Bomb shelters: Sea life thriving on toxic bed of Nazi missiles dumped in Baltic and North seas

Some of the animals observed on the V-1 flying bomb at the bottom of the Baltic Sea included a black goby, a common starfish and a European flounder, as well as anemones, hydrozoans and jellyfish. Tonnes of toxic German munitions, dumped in the Baltic and North Seas after World War II, have become an unlikely refuge for marine life, a new study has found. Photo / Vedenin et al., Nature Communications Earth and Environment via The New York Times

Late into World War II, Nazi Germany introduced the Fieseler Fi 103, or V-1, flying bomb, an early cruise missile.

It was the first of the Wunderwaffen, or “wonder weapons”, that were supposed to turn the tide of war back in Germany’s favour.

There was also the more famous, and formidable, V-2, subject of the 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

Although the V-1 missiles were used to terrorise London and Antwerp, Belgium, they could not stop the Allies.

After the war, some 1.6 million tonnes of mostly German munitions were dumped into the Baltic and North seas.

They have remained on the seafloor since, making for a macabre museum of human destructiveness.

A new study by German researchers has found that the sunken munitions also serve as a surprisingly robust sanctuary for sea life.

Published in September in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, the study is the first to document the extent to which some marine species have turned the surfaces of bombs meant to kill into thriving shelters.

“It’s absolutely insane,” said Jens Greinert, a deep-sea researcher at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, and one of the paper’s authors.

“It’s 80 years ago that this war ended, so two or three generations later, people have still to cope with the remains of this war. Apparently nature is a little bit more easygoing.”

Like the wildlife that has improbably come to thrive in the radiation-soaked expanse of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, as well as in the Demilitarized Zone that bifurcates the Korean Peninsula, the inhabitants of Europe’s marine graveyards seem to exemplify the dramatic extent of nature’s adaptation to humanity.

The V-1 missile contained about 1800 pounds (815kg) of TNT. Some sunken bombs have had their explosive elements exposed, meaning that harmful compounds are leaching into the water.

“We started researching this issue because we are concerned about the environment due to the release of toxic substances from the munition,” Greinert said in an interview.

“The explosive itself is toxic; it’s carcinogenic and mutagenic,” he added, meaning it can cause cancer and alter DNA.

But, as the researchers found, the sea life doesn’t seem to mind. It mostly remains confined to the outer metal surface of the bomb, which turns out to be an adequate sanctuary, regardless of what dangers lurk within the warhead.

The ban on fishing around sites where munitions were sunk proved another advantage. “The fauna simply realised, okay, there’s a protective space where they can live,” Greinert said.

To conduct the investigation, a remotely operated vehicle (named Kapt’n Blaubar, after a fictional German character) descended to a depth of about 20m in the waters of the Bay of Lubeck, off the northern coast of Germany.

There, the vehicle, which was equipped with a GoPro camera, took footage of nine different V-1 missiles that had been partially submerged and were “in various stages of degradation”, according to the paper.

“Some were almost intact, others — rusted out with the explosive content strongly dissolved,” the authors wrote.

The site had not previously been explored.

The researchers then counted the number of species visible on Kapt’n Blaubar’s video feed. They also used computer analysis to count the smaller organisms.

Sea worms, invertebrates also known as polychaetes, accounted for some 90% of the “total abundance”, the researchers observed.

They also found sea anemones, starfish and, in a few outlying instances, three fish species — Atlantic cod, black goby and European flounder — as well as the stray crab.

Some munitions, the researchers noted, hosted dense aggregations of starfish perhaps “chemically attracted to the exposed chunks by some components in the explosives”.

Despite the fact that a single type of invertebrate dominated, making for low diversity, the profusion of life on the munitions in general was remarkable, the researchers noted.

The munitions showed a density of 43,184 individual organisms per square metre, far higher than in the surrounding sediment (8213 organisms per sqm). That was almost identical to the density of organisms on natural surfaces, such as rocks, observed in the Baltic Sea.

“It is important that we got actual numbers, e.g. the abundance and diversity of the fauna that occurs on and around munition dumpsites,” Andrey Vedenin, a research scientist at the Senckenberg am Meer Research Institute in Wilhelmshaven and the lead author of the new study, wrote in an email. “Now we have actual data to work with.”

Kapt’n Blaubar did not disturb the explosives or the organisms that lived on them, but it did bring back water samples, which showed concentrations of explosive matter that approached “toxicity thresholds”.

In other words, the fact that some sea worms are thriving on the old V-1s does not compensate for the bombs’ ruinous impact on the environment and, possibly, human health.

“We only have a few studies,” said Jacek Beldowski, a professor at the Institute of Oceanology of the Polish Academy of Sciences who researches threats to marine health and was not involved in the new study.

“There is no systematic approach and no monitoring, so we do not really know how the situation will evolve,” he added.

“But we know that all the mechanisms that are dangerous exist, and the chemicals exist. At the moment, nothing really, really bad is happening. But in the future, who knows?”

European policymakers want to raise the munitions and dispose of them more responsibly. Given just how much marine life they would be disturbing, they may have to proceed with increased caution.

“We know that the munition creates these artificial reefs and biodiversity increases,” Beldowski said. But the contaminants are still being released from the missiles and are entering the food chain.

“So it’s a double-edged sword.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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