https://hakaimagazine.com/features/the-big-baltic-bomb-cleanup/
"Aboard the
Alkor, a 55-meter oceanographic vessel anchored in the Baltic Sea
several kilometers from the German port city of Kiel, engineer Henrik Schönheit
grips a joystick-like lever in his fist. He nudges the lever up, and a
one-of-a-kind robotic sea crawler about the size of a two-seat golf cart
responds, creeping forward along the seafloor on rubber caterpillar tracks 12
meters below the ship. As the crawler inspects Kiel bay’s sandy terrain, a live
video stream beams up to a computer screen in a cramped room aboard the ship.
The picture is so crystalline that it’s possible to count the tentacles of a
translucent jellyfish floating past the camera. A scrum of scientists and
technicians ooh and ah as they huddle around the screen, peering over
Schönheit’s shoulder.
The bright-yellow robot is the Norppa 300, the newest fabrication of the
explosive ordnance disposal company SeaTerra, which operates out of northern
Germany. SeaTerra’s cofounder Dieter Guldin rates as one of Europe’s canniest
experts for salvaging sunken explosives. Now, after years of experience
clearing the seafloor of hazards for commercial operations, and campaigning the
German government for large-scale remediation, SeaTerra is one of three
companies participating in the first-ever mission to systematically clear
munitions off a seafloor in the name of environmental protection. 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. Their casings are breaking apart and releasing carcinogens
into the seas.
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. Everyone huddled in the ship’s
dry lab watches rapt as the crawler bumps up against a vaguely rectangular
object the size of a bar fridge. It’s largely obscured by seaweed and, from the
looks of it, home to a lone Baltic flounder that’s swimming around the base.
Aaron Beck, senior scientist at Geomar Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, a
German marine research institute working alongside SeaTerra, identifies it as
an ammunition crate. “Look, the flatness there, the corner. That’s not of the
natural world,” he exclaims."
Via
Fix the News:
https://fixthenews.com/279-breakneck-solarisation/
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
