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A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs

News Feed
Tuesday, September 10, 2024

Germany’s North and Baltic Seas are littered with munitions from the First and Second World Wars, such as shells—as shown here—once fired from German battleships. SeaTerra Aboard the Alkor, a 180-foot oceanographic vessel anchored in the Baltic Sea a few miles 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 40 feet 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 aah 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 co-founder Dieter Guldin rates as one of Europe’s canniest experts on 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 1.6 million tons 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. Onboard the Alkor, during a test run this May, SeaTerra technicians Klaus-Dieter Golla, left, and Henrik Schönheit discuss video footage of the seafloor transmitted by the company’s Norppa 300 robot. Andreas Muenchbach 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 the Geomar Helmholtz Center 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. Dumped munitions lie in waters around the world but are ubiquitous in German waters. In the aftermath of World War II, all the conflict parties, including the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan and the United States, had to divest themselves of armaments. “They didn’t want [them] on land, and facilities to destroy [them] were too few,” explains Anita Künitzer of the German Environment Agency. Dumping at sea, a practice held over from World War I, was the obvious choice. In occupied Germany, British forces established underwater disposal zones—one of which lies near Kiel Bay. “But,” says Guldin, “on their way to the designated dumping grounds, they also just threw hardware overboard.” Grainy black-and-white film footage shows British sailors busily operating multiple conveyor belts to cast crate after crate of leftovers into the sea. Whole ships and submarines packed with live munitions were scuttled in the rush to disarm the Germans. 1500 Miles Of Bombs Along Our Roads Aka Ammunition Dumps Or Arms Dump (1946) Experts estimate that a ginormous 1.8 million tons of conventional munitions and another 5,500 tons of chemical weapons lie decomposing off Germany alone in the North and Baltic Seas, most from World War II. (Because of its busy ports, the North Sea received four times as much as the Baltic.) If all that weaponry were lined up, it would stretch from Paris to Moscow, about 1,500 miles! “Nowhere in German waters is there a square kilometer of seabed without munitions,” says Guldin. In the postwar decades, freelancing scrap metal collectors hauled explosives and other valuable wartime debris ashore to hawk on the metals market. Fisher boats that ensnared unexploded munitions in their nets were required to turn them in to coastal authorities, not toss them overboard again. The German Navy’s anti-mine units attempted to clear some of the mess, usually through initiating underwater explosions, but lacked the proper equipment to tackle the problem systematically. Only when the private sector picked up operations did a whole new suite of technology and skill sets emerge. Since the late 2000s, SeaTerra’s ensemble of marine biologists, hydraulic specialists, sedimentologists, divers, engineers, geophysicists, marine surveyors, pyrotechnicians and archaeologists—now about 160 people—have been mapping the sunken armaments as they worked to clear safe patches of seafloor for wind-farm, cable and pipeline projects. But until this year, SeaTerra never possessed the remit it has long coveted: to begin systematically ameliorating the seafloor for the sake of marine ecosystems—and the people dependent on them. The German government has set aside 100 million euros (over $110 million) to remove the toxic mess from Lübeck Bay, off the Baltic port city of Lübeck, southeast of Kiel, as a pilot project. “No other country in the world has ever attempted or achieved this,” says Tobias Goldschmidt, the region’s environment minister, in a press release. Experts prepare the Norppa 300 for a trial run in the Baltic Sea in May. Andreas Muenchbach Guldin and other advocates are elated that the project is on, but they acknowledge it will only dent the Baltic’s total quantity of submerged ordnance. Their goal is to recover between 55 and 88 tons worth of munitions, though the pilot’s primary purpose is for SeaTerra and the two other firms to test their technology and to demonstrate to bankrollers that the job is doable. “Then it’s about scaling up and getting faster,” says Guldin. Faster is vital, because in their watery graves, the many land and naval mines, U-boat torpedoes, depth charges, artillery shells, chemical weapons, aerial bombs, and incendiary devices have corroded over almost 80 years. The Germans, like other dumping nations, long assumed that when the casings broke down, the vast ocean would simply dissolve pollutants into harmless fractions. About 25 years ago, scientists discovered that instead, the explosives remain live and are now oozing into the ecosystem and up the food chain. That flounder darting in front of the crawler’s camera from the Alkor’s dry lab? It almost certainly contains traces of TNT, the highly toxic compound used in explosives. Toxicologist Jennifer Strehse, from the Kiel-based Institute of Toxicology and Pharmacology for Natural Scientists, which identified the mounting toxic pollution, says that contamination is particularly widespread in shellfish, bottom-dwelling flatfish and other fauna that are close to the munition dumps. They’re “contaminated with carcinogens from TNT or arsenic or heavy metals like lead and mercury,” she says. An image of Lübeck bay’s seafloor shows a smattering of bombs. Geomar Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Scientists have also found toxic concentrations of TNT in Atlantic purple sea urchins, mysid crustaceans and blue mussels. Once contaminants have escaped into the water, they can’t be recovered, Strehse points out. “So, we’re working against time.” German health experts recommend that consumers limit themselves to no more than two meals of local fish a week to reduce exposure to heavy metals, dioxins or PCBs. The source of most of these contaminants are industrial processes and the burning of fossil fuels; TNT does not figure into the guidelines. Nevertheless, the risk of TNT and other contaminants from weapons is enough to cause Strehse, herself, to steer clear of all Baltic Sea mussels. The risk of immediate loss of life is also ever-present. Most of the submerged weapons remain as powerful as the day they were dumped. Now rusted through, they are even more unstable—presenting a precarious obstacle to fishing boats trawling the seafloor as well as offshore wind-farm developers, whose sprawling turbine parks are integral to Europe’s transition to clean energy systems. In the two German seas, over 400 people—tourists, sailors, fishers, naval cadets and munitions experts—have lost their lives to explosions from sunken weapons. German aerial bombs retrieved from the Baltic Sea are stacked and secured before the SeaTerra team transports them ashore for disposal. Germany currently has only one major disposal facility for unexploded ordnance. SeaTerra The menace doesn’t stay at sea, either. As the munitions deteriorate, amber-colored chunks of phosphorous from incendiary bombs, fragments of TNT or rusted casings often wash up on shore. Beachcombers who touch solid white phosphorus—usually mistaking it for Baltic amber, a sought-after gemstone—can suffer third-degree burns or worse. The chemical element sticks to human skin and can combust spontaneously when exposed to air at temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Over half a century after the fighting ended, the task of addressing the environmental danger and risk to life from dumped munitions has become its own battle. When Guldin entered the field of munitions cleanup in 2000, he saw the problem’s vastness and malevolent power as the ultimate challenge for his technical imagination. Fifty-seven-year-old Guldin describes himself as a pacifist by nature and archaeologist by training. He grew up far removed from oceans, in southern Germany’s Black Forest where, as a conscientious objector, he refused to serve in the German Army, later joining the Green Party instead. He helped excavate Roman settlements along the Rhine River. Then he moved on to the Middle East, where he unearthed ancient civilizations in Yemen and Lebanon. Eventually, in 2000, he admitted to himself that the long stays abroad and one-off digs weren’t conducive to the family life he wanted. Shortly after this, he touched base with an old friend, Edgar Schwab. Dieter Guldin of SeaTerra has been encouraging the German government to clean up sunken war munitions for years. Drones Magazin Schwab, a geophysicist, was in Hamburg, Germany, and one step ahead of his buddy—starting up a little company to appropriate the lethal relics of the Third Reich from the ocean floor. The two friends were less interested in digging to explain humanity’s past than in undoing the damage it had inflicted upon nature, and together they co-founded SeaTerra. Guldin immersed himself in the history of munitions dumping in Northern Europe—a practice that was discontinued worldwide only in 1975. While SeaTerra conscientiously cleared patches of seafloor for industry, the mass of munitions across the greater seafloor gnawed at him. He insisted that his country clean it up so that future generations wouldn’t suffer this legacy of wars executed by generations past. He worked the halls of power for ten years but couldn’t get officialdom to touch the odious issue. The fact that the seafloor was littered with munitions has been common knowledge since 1945, but no one knew exactly how much there was or where. SeaTerra and a smorgasbord of concerned groups, including Strehse’s institute, understood that before anybody was going to address the issue, they first had to find out exactly what they were dealing with. In the course of its work for private companies, SeaTerra began developing technology—such as a prototype crawler, the DeepC—for surveying the seafloor, foot by excruciating foot. In the deep and churning North Sea, with its muscular tidal currents, much of the detritus lies yards beneath the seafloor. To penetrate the sediment, SeaTerra developed underwater drones and advanced multibeam radar equipment. For shallow tidal areas, SeaTerra also created low-flying drones outfitted with magnetic sensors that can detect metallic masses buried deep in the sand. SeaTerra technicians lower a device called a ScanFish. They use it to tow magnetic sensors through the water, about six feet above the seafloor. SeaTerra Many of SeaTerra’s innovations entailed modifying technology used in related fields, like mining, pyrotechnics and archaeology. The team started with a lot of energy but few resources: “In the beginning, we used zip ties and duct tape for everything,” Guldin says. The range of state-of-the-art technology the team now operates is not the brainchild of one person, but Guldin has been central to much of it. Now, with a firm grasp of the problem and how to address it, Guldin and others at SeaTerra are itching to display their accumulated know-how in Lübeck Bay. “The time has now come,” he announced recently on LinkedIn. “We, the explosive ordnance disposal companies, can now start our real work to make the oceans cleaner … and to measure our ideas and concepts against the physical reality of this blight.” It is, his announcement says, a great success for the company and a “recognition of our many years of effort in developing new technologies and concepts for explosive ordnance at sea.” Aboard the Alkor, the scientists believe their star, the Norppa 300, is ready for official deployment in Lübeck Bay. The crawler is the culmination of years of invention, testing and tweaking. Unlike previous undersea robots, it operates at depths up to almost 1,000 feet and can do so 24/7, even in turbulent waters. Its many functions will relieve professional divers of some of the cleanup expedition’s most perilous tasks. The robot is equipped with sonar and acoustic imaging for detecting and identifying buried munitions. Its detachable arms include a custom-designed vacuum that gingerly sucks up sediment from buried explosives and a pincer for lifting pieces of ammunition. The cleanup process for weapons that can be handled will involve three general steps using specialized ships. First, SeaTerra’s engineers and scientists on the Alkor—the survey vessel—will scan the site and classify the munitions. They will also take water samples for the Geomar Helmholtz Center to analyze on board, distinguishing conventional from chemical weaponry. Chemical weapons, which contain phosgene, arsenic and sulfur mustard (also known as mustard gas), are too lethal to handle, probably ever, admits Guldin. “You can’t see these gases or smell them,” he says, “and their detonation could blow a ship out of the water, killing a ship’s entire crew in a matter of minutes.” Those weapons will be left untouched. Aaron Beck of Geomar Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research stands beside a mass spectrometer, used to analyze the chemical contents of water samples, in the Alkor’s dry lab. Andreas Muenchbach Künitzer of the environment agency adds that the Nazis’ nerve gases were designed to incapacitate the eyes, skin and lungs of battlefield foes. “Decades underwater doesn’t dilute their potency,” she says. If the experts determine the material is safe enough for transportation, they’ll deploy the Norppa 300 to collect and deposit smaller items, like grenades, into undersea wire-mesh baskets. But if the explosive specialists monitoring from the ship above determine that the weaponry still contains detonators, divers—not a robot—will be sent to detach them. This is hazardous business that, thus far, only humans can execute. Next, a different team on a second ship—the clearance vessel—equipped with spud legs (stakes that hold the ship in place) will use a hydraulic crane equipped with cameras to extract larger munitions, including those with corrupted casings, and drop them into undersea receptacles. The final step is for a third team to haul the cargo onto the deck of their ship—the sorting vessel—to sort, label and package the lethal concoctions in steel tubes, and then transport them to an interim site in the Baltic Sea. There the material will be re-sunk in the tubes and stored underwater until it can be handed over to the responsible state authority, the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Service, for demolition. Some of the munitions SeaTerra clears from Germany’s seas date back to World War I, such as the six-inch-long cast iron shell shown here. SeaTerra The workers will have two months to clear the bay—and demonstrate whether the Norppa 300 and other technologies are either up to it or not. But there’s a hitch that will delay the destruction of all of the recovered weapons for about a year. Germany has a single major munitions disposal facility, and it is occupied with incinerating unexploded ordnance from around the globe, not least, incredibly, Nazi-era explosives still being unearthed from construction sites. That’s why the Lübeck Bay project’s budget includes construction of a disposal facility. The company and concept have yet to be finalized. One option is to build a floating clearance platform where robots would dissect ordnance and burn the chemical contents in a detonation chamber at temperatures of over 2300 degrees Fahrenheit, similar to how weapons are disposed of at the land-based facility. And there’s another issue. Over the years, the mounds of weaponry in the undersea dumping grounds have corroded and collapsed into one another, creating a gnarled, combustible mass of metals and explosive agents that make their recovery more complicated. The only options are to leave these or blow them up on-site. The best-case scenario is that all the Baltic’s most hazardous conventional munitions will finally be history by 2050, and work on the North Sea will be well underway. The worst case is that funding does not materialize and the mountains of explosives will continue to deteriorate en masse, emitting poisons. Before the green light came to start the cleanup, Guldin was becoming doubtful his country would ever address the mess, and he thought he might have to accept that SeaTerra’s expertise would never be put to the greater task that he and Schwab had envisioned. For the foreseeable future at least, he’ll be in the thick of culminating his life’s work, undoing some of humanity’s sins on the seafloor. This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com. Related stories from Hakai Magazine: • Weapons of War Litter the Ocean Floor • Why Ocean Shores Beachcombing Is a Blast Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

The ocean became a dumping ground for weapons after Allied forces defeated the Nazis. Now a team of robots and divers is making the waters safer

header-uncropped-robots-and-war-munitions.jpg
Germany’s North and Baltic Seas are littered with munitions from the First and Second World Wars, such as shells—as shown here—once fired from German battleships. SeaTerra

Aboard the Alkor, a 180-foot oceanographic vessel anchored in the Baltic Sea a few miles 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 40 feet 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 aah 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 co-founder Dieter Guldin rates as one of Europe’s canniest experts on 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 1.6 million tons 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.

A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs
Onboard the Alkor, during a test run this May, SeaTerra technicians Klaus-Dieter Golla, left, and Henrik Schönheit discuss video footage of the seafloor transmitted by the company’s Norppa 300 robot. Andreas Muenchbach

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 the Geomar Helmholtz Center 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.


Dumped munitions lie in waters around the world but are ubiquitous in German waters. In the aftermath of World War II, all the conflict parties, including the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan and the United States, had to divest themselves of armaments. “They didn’t want [them] on land, and facilities to destroy [them] were too few,” explains Anita Künitzer of the German Environment Agency. Dumping at sea, a practice held over from World War I, was the obvious choice.

In occupied Germany, British forces established underwater disposal zones—one of which lies near Kiel Bay. “But,” says Guldin, “on their way to the designated dumping grounds, they also just threw hardware overboard.” Grainy black-and-white film footage shows British sailors busily operating multiple conveyor belts to cast crate after crate of leftovers into the sea. Whole ships and submarines packed with live munitions were scuttled in the rush to disarm the Germans.

1500 Miles Of Bombs Along Our Roads Aka Ammunition Dumps Or Arms Dump (1946)

Experts estimate that a ginormous 1.8 million tons of conventional munitions and another 5,500 tons of chemical weapons lie decomposing off Germany alone in the North and Baltic Seas, most from World War II. (Because of its busy ports, the North Sea received four times as much as the Baltic.) If all that weaponry were lined up, it would stretch from Paris to Moscow, about 1,500 miles! “Nowhere in German waters is there a square kilometer of seabed without munitions,” says Guldin.

In the postwar decades, freelancing scrap metal collectors hauled explosives and other valuable wartime debris ashore to hawk on the metals market. Fisher boats that ensnared unexploded munitions in their nets were required to turn them in to coastal authorities, not toss them overboard again. The German Navy’s anti-mine units attempted to clear some of the mess, usually through initiating underwater explosions, but lacked the proper equipment to tackle the problem systematically. Only when the private sector picked up operations did a whole new suite of technology and skill sets emerge.

Since the late 2000s, SeaTerra’s ensemble of marine biologists, hydraulic specialists, sedimentologists, divers, engineers, geophysicists, marine surveyors, pyrotechnicians and archaeologists—now about 160 people—have been mapping the sunken armaments as they worked to clear safe patches of seafloor for wind-farm, cable and pipeline projects.

But until this year, SeaTerra never possessed the remit it has long coveted: to begin systematically ameliorating the seafloor for the sake of marine ecosystems—and the people dependent on them. The German government has set aside 100 million euros (over $110 million) to remove the toxic mess from Lübeck Bay, off the Baltic port city of Lübeck, southeast of Kiel, as a pilot project. “No other country in the world has ever attempted or achieved this,” says Tobias Goldschmidt, the region’s environment minister, in a press release.

A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs
Experts prepare the Norppa 300 for a trial run in the Baltic Sea in May. Andreas Muenchbach

Guldin and other advocates are elated that the project is on, but they acknowledge it will only dent the Baltic’s total quantity of submerged ordnance. Their goal is to recover between 55 and 88 tons worth of munitions, though the pilot’s primary purpose is for SeaTerra and the two other firms to test their technology and to demonstrate to bankrollers that the job is doable. “Then it’s about scaling up and getting faster,” says Guldin.


Faster is vital, because in their watery graves, the many land and naval mines, U-boat torpedoes, depth charges, artillery shells, chemical weapons, aerial bombs, and incendiary devices have corroded over almost 80 years. The Germans, like other dumping nations, long assumed that when the casings broke down, the vast ocean would simply dissolve pollutants into harmless fractions. About 25 years ago, scientists discovered that instead, the explosives remain live and are now oozing into the ecosystem and up the food chain.

That flounder darting in front of the crawler’s camera from the Alkor’s dry lab? It almost certainly contains traces of TNT, the highly toxic compound used in explosives. Toxicologist Jennifer Strehse, from the Kiel-based Institute of Toxicology and Pharmacology for Natural Scientists, which identified the mounting toxic pollution, says that contamination is particularly widespread in shellfish, bottom-dwelling flatfish and other fauna that are close to the munition dumps. They’re “contaminated with carcinogens from TNT or arsenic or heavy metals like lead and mercury,” she says.

A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs
An image of Lübeck bay’s seafloor shows a smattering of bombs. Geomar Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research

Scientists have also found toxic concentrations of TNT in Atlantic purple sea urchins, mysid crustaceans and blue mussels. Once contaminants have escaped into the water, they can’t be recovered, Strehse points out. “So, we’re working against time.”

German health experts recommend that consumers limit themselves to no more than two meals of local fish a week to reduce exposure to heavy metals, dioxins or PCBs. The source of most of these contaminants are industrial processes and the burning of fossil fuels; TNT does not figure into the guidelines. Nevertheless, the risk of TNT and other contaminants from weapons is enough to cause Strehse, herself, to steer clear of all Baltic Sea mussels.

The risk of immediate loss of life is also ever-present. Most of the submerged weapons remain as powerful as the day they were dumped. Now rusted through, they are even more unstable—presenting a precarious obstacle to fishing boats trawling the seafloor as well as offshore wind-farm developers, whose sprawling turbine parks are integral to Europe’s transition to clean energy systems. In the two German seas, over 400 people—tourists, sailors, fishers, naval cadets and munitions experts—have lost their lives to explosions from sunken weapons.

A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs
German aerial bombs retrieved from the Baltic Sea are stacked and secured before the SeaTerra team transports them ashore for disposal. Germany currently has only one major disposal facility for unexploded ordnance. SeaTerra

The menace doesn’t stay at sea, either. As the munitions deteriorate, amber-colored chunks of phosphorous from incendiary bombs, fragments of TNT or rusted casings often wash up on shore. Beachcombers who touch solid white phosphorus—usually mistaking it for Baltic amber, a sought-after gemstone—can suffer third-degree burns or worse. The chemical element sticks to human skin and can combust spontaneously when exposed to air at temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit.

Over half a century after the fighting ended, the task of addressing the environmental danger and risk to life from dumped munitions has become its own battle. When Guldin entered the field of munitions cleanup in 2000, he saw the problem’s vastness and malevolent power as the ultimate challenge for his technical imagination.


Fifty-seven-year-old Guldin describes himself as a pacifist by nature and archaeologist by training. He grew up far removed from oceans, in southern Germany’s Black Forest where, as a conscientious objector, he refused to serve in the German Army, later joining the Green Party instead. He helped excavate Roman settlements along the Rhine River. Then he moved on to the Middle East, where he unearthed ancient civilizations in Yemen and Lebanon. Eventually, in 2000, he admitted to himself that the long stays abroad and one-off digs weren’t conducive to the family life he wanted. Shortly after this, he touched base with an old friend, Edgar Schwab.

A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs
Dieter Guldin of SeaTerra has been encouraging the German government to clean up sunken war munitions for years. Drones Magazin

Schwab, a geophysicist, was in Hamburg, Germany, and one step ahead of his buddy—starting up a little company to appropriate the lethal relics of the Third Reich from the ocean floor. The two friends were less interested in digging to explain humanity’s past than in undoing the damage it had inflicted upon nature, and together they co-founded SeaTerra.

Guldin immersed himself in the history of munitions dumping in Northern Europe—a practice that was discontinued worldwide only in 1975. While SeaTerra conscientiously cleared patches of seafloor for industry, the mass of munitions across the greater seafloor gnawed at him. He insisted that his country clean it up so that future generations wouldn’t suffer this legacy of wars executed by generations past. He worked the halls of power for ten years but couldn’t get officialdom to touch the odious issue.

The fact that the seafloor was littered with munitions has been common knowledge since 1945, but no one knew exactly how much there was or where. SeaTerra and a smorgasbord of concerned groups, including Strehse’s institute, understood that before anybody was going to address the issue, they first had to find out exactly what they were dealing with.

In the course of its work for private companies, SeaTerra began developing technology—such as a prototype crawler, the DeepC—for surveying the seafloor, foot by excruciating foot. In the deep and churning North Sea, with its muscular tidal currents, much of the detritus lies yards beneath the seafloor. To penetrate the sediment, SeaTerra developed underwater drones and advanced multibeam radar equipment. For shallow tidal areas, SeaTerra also created low-flying drones outfitted with magnetic sensors that can detect metallic masses buried deep in the sand.

A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs
SeaTerra technicians lower a device called a ScanFish. They use it to tow magnetic sensors through the water, about six feet above the seafloor. SeaTerra

Many of SeaTerra’s innovations entailed modifying technology used in related fields, like mining, pyrotechnics and archaeology. The team started with a lot of energy but few resources: “In the beginning, we used zip ties and duct tape for everything,” Guldin says. The range of state-of-the-art technology the team now operates is not the brainchild of one person, but Guldin has been central to much of it.

Now, with a firm grasp of the problem and how to address it, Guldin and others at SeaTerra are itching to display their accumulated know-how in Lübeck Bay. “The time has now come,” he announced recently on LinkedIn. “We, the explosive ordnance disposal companies, can now start our real work to make the oceans cleaner … and to measure our ideas and concepts against the physical reality of this blight.” It is, his announcement says, a great success for the company and a “recognition of our many years of effort in developing new technologies and concepts for explosive ordnance at sea.”


Aboard the Alkor, the scientists believe their star, the Norppa 300, is ready for official deployment in Lübeck Bay. The crawler is the culmination of years of invention, testing and tweaking. Unlike previous undersea robots, it operates at depths up to almost 1,000 feet and can do so 24/7, even in turbulent waters. Its many functions will relieve professional divers of some of the cleanup expedition’s most perilous tasks. The robot is equipped with sonar and acoustic imaging for detecting and identifying buried munitions. Its detachable arms include a custom-designed vacuum that gingerly sucks up sediment from buried explosives and a pincer for lifting pieces of ammunition.

The cleanup process for weapons that can be handled will involve three general steps using specialized ships. First, SeaTerra’s engineers and scientists on the Alkor—the survey vesselwill scan the site and classify the munitions. They will also take water samples for the Geomar Helmholtz Center to analyze on board, distinguishing conventional from chemical weaponry. Chemical weapons, which contain phosgene, arsenic and sulfur mustard (also known as mustard gas), are too lethal to handle, probably ever, admits Guldin. “You can’t see these gases or smell them,” he says, “and their detonation could blow a ship out of the water, killing a ship’s entire crew in a matter of minutes.” Those weapons will be left untouched.

A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs
Aaron Beck of Geomar Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research stands beside a mass spectrometer, used to analyze the chemical contents of water samples, in the Alkor’s dry lab. Andreas Muenchbach

Künitzer of the environment agency adds that the Nazis’ nerve gases were designed to incapacitate the eyes, skin and lungs of battlefield foes. “Decades underwater doesn’t dilute their potency,” she says.

If the experts determine the material is safe enough for transportation, they’ll deploy the Norppa 300 to collect and deposit smaller items, like grenades, into undersea wire-mesh baskets. But if the explosive specialists monitoring from the ship above determine that the weaponry still contains detonators, divers—not a robot—will be sent to detach them. This is hazardous business that, thus far, only humans can execute.

Next, a different team on a second ship—the clearance vessel—equipped with spud legs (stakes that hold the ship in place) will use a hydraulic crane equipped with cameras to extract larger munitions, including those with corrupted casings, and drop them into undersea receptacles. The final step is for a third team to haul the cargo onto the deck of their ship—the sorting vessel—to sort, label and package the lethal concoctions in steel tubes, and then transport them to an interim site in the Baltic Sea. There the material will be re-sunk in the tubes and stored underwater until it can be handed over to the responsible state authority, the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Service, for demolition.

A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs
Some of the munitions SeaTerra clears from Germany’s seas date back to World War I, such as the six-inch-long cast iron shell shown here. SeaTerra

The workers will have two months to clear the bay—and demonstrate whether the Norppa 300 and other technologies are either up to it or not.

But there’s a hitch that will delay the destruction of all of the recovered weapons for about a year. Germany has a single major munitions disposal facility, and it is occupied with incinerating unexploded ordnance from around the globe, not least, incredibly, Nazi-era explosives still being unearthed from construction sites. That’s why the Lübeck Bay project’s budget includes construction of a disposal facility. The company and concept have yet to be finalized. One option is to build a floating clearance platform where robots would dissect ordnance and burn the chemical contents in a detonation chamber at temperatures of over 2300 degrees Fahrenheit, similar to how weapons are disposed of at the land-based facility.

And there’s another issue. Over the years, the mounds of weaponry in the undersea dumping grounds have corroded and collapsed into one another, creating a gnarled, combustible mass of metals and explosive agents that make their recovery more complicated. The only options are to leave these or blow them up on-site. The best-case scenario is that all the Baltic’s most hazardous conventional munitions will finally be history by 2050, and work on the North Sea will be well underway. The worst case is that funding does not materialize and the mountains of explosives will continue to deteriorate en masse, emitting poisons.

Before the green light came to start the cleanup, Guldin was becoming doubtful his country would ever address the mess, and he thought he might have to accept that SeaTerra’s expertise would never be put to the greater task that he and Schwab had envisioned. For the foreseeable future at least, he’ll be in the thick of culminating his life’s work, undoing some of humanity’s sins on the seafloor.

This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

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Weapons of War Litter the Ocean Floor

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UK spending watchdog censures water firms and regulators over sewage failings

NAO finds regulatory gaps have enabled overspending on infrastructure building while not improving sewage worksWater companies have been getting away with failures to improve sewage works and overspending because of regulatory problems, a damning report by the government’s spending watchdog has found.Firms have overspent on infrastructure building, the National Audit Office (NAO) found, with some of these costs being added to consumers’ bills. The Guardian this week reported Ofwat and the independent water commission are investigating water firms for spending up to 10 times as much on their sewage works and piping as comparable countries. Continue reading...

Water companies have been getting away with failures to improve sewage works and overspending because of regulatory problems, a damning report by the government’s spending watchdog has found.Firms have overspent on infrastructure building, the National Audit Office (NAO) found, with some of these costs being added to consumers’ bills. The Guardian this week reported Ofwat and the independent water commission are investigating water firms for spending up to 10 times as much on their sewage works and piping as comparable countries.Bills in England and Wales are rising by £123 on average this year, and will go up further over the next five years, so that companies can fix ageing sewage infrastructure and stop spills of human waste from contaminating rivers and seas. Several water firms have complained to the Competition and Markets Authority because they want the regulator to allow them to increase bills even further.Only 1% of water companies’ actions to improve environmental performance, such as improving sewer overflows, have been inspected by the Environment Agency, the authors of the NAO report said. They also found there was no regulator responsible for proactively inspecting wastewater assets to prevent further environmental harm.The report, which audited the three water regulators, Ofwat, the Environment Agency, and the Drinking Water Inspectorate, as well as the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, also found the regulators did not have a good understanding of the condition of infrastructure assets such as leaking sewers and ageing sewage treatment facilities as they do not have a set of metrics to assess their condition.Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO, said: “Given the unprecedented situation facing the sector, Defra and the regulators need to act urgently to address industry performance and resilience to ensure the sector can meet government targets and achieve value for money over the long term for bill payers.”Despite the huge costs of infrastructure, the water companies have moved slowly meaning that at the current rate, it would take 700 years to replace the entire existing water network, the report found. Regulatory gaps and a lack of urgency about replacing old and malfunctioning infrastructure has caused a “rising tide of risk” in the sector, which is contributing to increasing bills for customers, the report warned.It also criticised the lack of a national plan for water supply and recommended that Defra must understand the costs and deliverability of its plans, alongside the impact they would have on customers’ bills.Several of the issues raised by the NAO, including concerns about weak infrastructure, have come to the fore in the debate over the future of Thames Water, the country’s largest water company with 16 million customers. Thames, which is under significant financial pressure with almost £20bn in debt, needs to secure fresh investment within months. Questions over the state of Thames’s infrastructure and regulatory punishment it could face for its failures have dogged the process of winning fresh funds. Meanwhile, Ofwat has also rejected its requests to raise bills by as much as 59%, instead allowing a 35% increase over the next five years.The government set up the independent water commission (IWC) last year to investigate how the water industry operated and whether regulation was fit for purpose.Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the Tory chair of the Commons public accounts committee, said: “Today’s NAO report lays bare the scale of the challenges facing the water sector – not least the real prospect of water shortfall without urgent action.“The consequences of government’s failure to regulate this sector properly are now landing squarely on bill payers who are being left to pick up the tab. After years of under-investment, pollution incidents and water supply issues, it is no surprise that consumer trust is at an all-time low. Having not built any reservoirs in the last 30 years, we now need 10.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Business TodayGet set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morningPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotion“Consumers rightly expect a water sector that is robust, resilient and fit for the future. Defra and the regulators must focus on rebuilding public confidence and ensure the sector can attract the long-term investment it desperately needs.”An Environment Agency spokesperson said: “We recognise the significant challenges facing the water industry. That is why we will be working with Defra and other water regulators to implement the report’s recommendations and update our frameworks to reflect its findings.”An Ofwat spokesperson added: “We agree with the NAO’s recommendations for Ofwat and we continue to progress our work in these areas, and to contribute to the IWC wider review of the regulatory framework. We also look forward to the IWC’s recommendations and to working with government and other regulators to better deliver for customers and the environment.”A Defra spokesperson said: “The government has taken urgent action to fix the water industry – but change will not happen overnight. We have put water companies under tough special measures through our landmark Water Act.”Water UK, which represents the water companies, has been contacted for comment.

Water firms admit sewage monitoring damaging public trust

The industry says powers to self-monitor water quality should be handed back to the regulator.

Water companies should no longer be allowed to monitor their own levels of sewage pollution, the industry body has told the BBC exclusively.Instead they are proposing a new, third-party monitoring system to build consumer trust.The recommendation is part of a submission made to the UK government's independent review into the water sector.Campaigners have long complained the companies' self-reporting has prevented the true scale of pollution in UK water being revealed.A third-party system could add more pressure to the regulators, which have also been criticised for not holding the companies to account. A report from the National Audit Office is expected to say on Friday that the Environment Agency does not currently have enough capacity to take on any new monitoring.David Henderson, CEO of industry body Water UK, told the BBC: "We absolutely accept that self-monitoring is not helping to instil trust and so we would like to see an end to it, and in place of it a more robust, third-party system." As part of their permitting arrangements water companies are expected to regularly sample water quality to identify potential pollution, and submit this data to the Environment Agency in an arrangement known as "operator self monitoring". But there have been incidents of misreporting by water companies in England and Wales uncovered by the regulators, who said some cases had been deliberate.Southern Water was previously issued fines totalling £213m by the industry regulator (Ofwat) and the environmental regulator (the Environment Agency) for manipulating sewage data.In that case, there was unreported pollution into numerous conservation sites which caused "major environmental harm" to wildlife.The company later admitted its actions "fell short".Henderson added that the industry never asked to self-monitor, but that it was introduced in 2009 by the then Labour government to "reduce the administrative burden" on the Environment Agency (EA). In 2023, the BBC reported that EA staff were concerned that, due to funding cuts, the Agency was increasingly relying on water companies to self-report rather than carrying out its own checks on pollution from sewage. The current environment minister, Steve Reed, has promised to review the system, calling it the equivalent of companies "mark[ing] their own homework".But the National Audit Office (NAO), which reviews government spending, questioned the ability of the EA to take on any new monitoring. "Regulators need to address the fact that they currently have limited oversight over whether water companies are carrying out their work as expected. It is hard to see how they will achieve this without increased overall capacity," said Anita Shah, NAO Director of Regulation.It is expected to publish a full review of the regulation of the water sector on Friday. A Defra spokesperson told the BBC: "We are committed to taking decisive action to fix the water industry. The Water Commission's recommendations will mark the next major step [to] restore public trust in the sector."The government launched an independent water commission in October to review the sector and the way it is regulated. The public consultation closed on Wednesday with the findings expected in July. Water UK submitted a 200-page document of recommendations, including this call to end self-monitoring.The industry body also requested that water meters be universal across England and Wales to make bills fairer. At present about 60% of the population have a meter."The meter is just to ensure that people are paying for what they use as opposed to a flat rate of system where you can use virtually no water and pay the same as someone filling up a pool three times in a summer," said Henderson."This doesn't properly reflect the value of water and encourage people to conserve it in the way that we need," he added.

Cambodia Canal's Impact on Mekong Questioned After China Signs Deal

By Francesco Guarascio(Reuters) -Cambodia should share a feasibility study on the impact of a planned China-backed canal that would divert water...

(Reuters) -Cambodia should share a feasibility study on the impact of a planned China-backed canal that would divert water from the rice-growing floodplains of Vietnam's Mekong Delta, said the body overseeing the transnational river.After months of uncertainty, Phnom Penh last week signed a deal with China to develop the Funan Techo Canal when President Xi Jinping visited Cambodia as part of a tour of Southeast Asia.It was Beijing's first explicit public commitment to the project, giving state-controlled construction giant China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) a 49% stake through a subsidiary, but also linking Chinese support to the "sustainability" of the project.The Secretariat of the intergovernmental Mekong River Commission (MRC) that coordinates the sustainable development of Southeast Asia's longest river said it had so far received from Cambodia only "basic information" on the project."We hope that further details, including the feasibility study report and other relevant reports, will be provided," the Commission said in a statement to Reuters this week.That would be needed "to ensure that any potential implications for the broader Mekong Basin are fully considered," it added.The canal has already created concern among environmentalists who say it could further harm the delicate ecology of the Mekong Delta, which is Vietnam's major rice growing region and is already facing problems of drought and salination as result of infrastructure projects upstream. Vietnam is also a leading exporter of rice.On Friday, the Cambodian government said the canal would have minimal environmental impact and "aligns with the 1995 Mekong Agreement" which governs cooperation among riverine countries in Southeast Asia.The Mekong River, fed by a series of tributaries, flows some 4,900 kilometres (3,045 miles) from its source in the Tibetan plateau through China, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to the sea."Whether the Funan Techo Canal violates the 1995 Mekong Agreement depends on several factors, including its connection to the Mekong mainstream," the Commission said, offering additional guidance to Phnom Penh and other member states "to ensure compliance".Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam are members of the MRC while China and Myanmar are dialogue partners.The Cambodian government did not respond to questions about whether it intended to share the requested documents.Vietnam's foreign ministry did not reply to a request for comment after the deal with China was signed, but the country has repeatedly asked Cambodia to share more information about the canal to assess its impact.Xi made no reference to the canal in his public statements in Phnom Penh but a joint communique issued at the end of his visit said China supported Cambodia in building the canal "in accordance with the principles of feasibility and sustainability".The deal signed by CCCC on Friday was for a 151.6 km (94.2 miles) canal costing $1.16 billion.However, the Cambodian government says on the canal's official website that the waterway would stretch 180 km and cost $1.7 billion at completion in 2028.The higher cost reflects a short section to be built by Cambodian firms as well as bridges and water conservation resources, the government told Reuters without clarifying who would pay for the bridges and water conservation.Cambodia's deputy prime minister said in May 2024 that China would cover the entire cost of the project, which was put at $1.7 billion.The canal is designed to link the Mekong Basin to the Gulf of Thailand in Cambodia's southern Kep province. Much of the Mekong's nutrient-rich sediment no longer reaches rice farms in the Delta because of multiple hydroelectric dams built by China upriver, a Reuters analysis showed in 2022.The project agreed with China is also different from the original plan as it is focusing on boosting irrigation rather than solely pursuing navigation purposes, said Brian Eyler, an expert on the Mekong region at U.S.-based think tank Stimson Center.The water diverted from the Mekong Delta "will be much more than previously described," said Eyler.(Reporting by Francesco Guarascio; additional reporting by Khanh Vu in Hanoi; Editing by Kate Mayberry)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

EPA chief urges Mexico to help deliver '100% solution' to clean up polluted Tijuana River

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin visited the polluted Tijuana River on the U.S.-Mexico border, calling for a '100% solution' to clean up raw sewage that has fouled the waterway for years.

U.S. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin on Tuesday called for Mexico and the U.S. to develop a “100% solution” to stop the flow of raw sewage from Tijuana that has polluted the Tijuana River and left communities near the border coping with foul odors and beaches that are often closed because of high bacteria levels.“Americans on our side of the border who have been dealing with this for decades are out of patience,” Zeldin said during a news conference in San Diego. “They want action and they’re right.”Zeldin visited the river north of the border and met with Mexican government officials as well as local officials in San Diego County. He said the Trump administration is seeking “max collaboration and extreme urgency to end a crisis that should have ended a long time ago.”The Tijuana River has been plagued with untreated sewage and industrial waste from Tijuana for decades. The city’s growth has far outpaced the existing sewage treatment plants, and inadequate and broken facilities spew waste into the river, polluting the water and air in Imperial Beach and other communities near the border.Zeldin met for about 90 minutes on Monday night with Mexican Environment Secretary Alicia Bárcena and other Mexican officials, who he said indicated that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and her administration are “fully committed to doing their part to resolving this issue.” Bárcena said in a post on social media that it was a “very productive meeting.”“We agreed to reinforce our joint actions,” Bárcena said, “to accelerate the projects to address the sanitation of Rio Tijuana for the well-being of our communities.”Zeldin said Mexico still needs to provide $88 million that it previously pledged in a 2022 agreement. He said that U.S. and Mexican officials soon plan to draw up a “specific statement from both countries” outlining actions the Mexican government will take to help address the problems.“We all need to be on the same page on the 100% solution from the U.S. side that if all of these things on that list get done, this crisis is over,” Zeldin said.He didn’t discuss costs or a timetable, but said the goal should be to “to get every project done as fast as humanly possible.”The environmental group American Rivers last week ranked the Tijuana River No. 2 on its annual list of the nation’s most endangered rivers, up from No. 9 on the list last year. The group said it elevated the river on the list to bring greater attention to the waterway’s chronic pollution problems and the lack of action to clean it up.Environmental advocates have urged the U.S. government to prioritize fixing and expanding the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant north of the border, which handles sewage from Tijuana and is in disrepair.Zeldin toured the South Bay plant, where he met with Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre and other officials. With him were members of Congress including Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) and Mike Levin (D-San Juan Capistrano).Levin said the U.S. government has appropriated $653 million for fixing and expanding the South Bay wastewater plant — an amount that steadily increased after an initial $300 million was committed in 2020.“We’ve got to get those shovels in the ground,” Levin said. “We’ve got to get the South Bay plant up and running, doubled in capacity, as quickly as possible.”Zeldin also said he was meeting with Navy SEALs who train in the area and have suffered illnesses because of the polluted water.In a recent report, the Department of Defense said about 1,100 cases of illness were reported among Navy SEALS and other service members who were exposed to high levels of bacteria when they trained in and around the ocean near the border.“This has been a problem for decades. It hasn’t been corrected. It’s only gotten worse,” said Dan’l Steward, a retired Navy captain and former SEAL who lives in Coronado but did not attend Tuesday’s events.Decades ago, Steward got sick after basic underwater SEAL training and had to take antibiotics to recover. Steward said he has heard similar stories from SEALs and candidates who undergo training along the beaches in Coronado. “It’s a national security issue,” Steward said. For Navy personnel in the area, he said, “it’s limiting them in their ability to properly train, and it’s endangering their lives for the ones that are going through basic training in particular.”Others affected, he said, include Marines, Coast Guard service members and Border Patrol agents. Steward said his daughter, while surfing nearby, became sick with an infection from a type of bacteria called MRSA, which is resistant to many antibiotics.“The United States has a role to help improve the situation, even though their plants are south of the border,” Steward said. “We all have a role to play here. And I also feel that’s the only way to solve the problem.”Ramon Chairez, director of environmental advocacy for the Encinitas-based nonprofit group Un Mar de Colores, said he’d like to see various actions taken on the U.S. side of the border, including working to dismantle culverts where polluted water cascades down and sends polluted water vapor and gases into the air.Chairez said he thought Zeldin’s focus on collaboration between Mexico and the U.S. made sense.“Overall, I think the general tone is pointing more towards holding Mexico accountable, although there’s some acknowledgment that it’s going to be a collaborative effort on both sides of the border,” Chairez said.One topic that wasn’t discussed but has contributed to the problems, he said, is that many U.S.-based companies have set up factories on the Mexican side of the border.“I didn’t hear a word about maquiladoras and factories and industries on the Mexican side and holding them accountable,” he said. “There’s American and California-based corporations operating all along the border, and especially in Tijuana, and they’re polluting the river just as much.”Matthew Tejada, senior vice president of environmental health for the Natural Resources Defense Fund, said the commitments from U.S. officials sound good, but he also said delivering on those pledges will be more complicated because of cuts in budget and staffing. He noted that Zeldin has said he wants to eliminate 65% of the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget.“It will be an interesting trick for EPA to achieve exactly those sorts of outcomes while they are internally tearing down the very staff and systems they need to actually make those changes happen,” Tejada said.He said the Trump administration’s recent actions, including cutting funding and rolling back environmental protection measures, are “making it that much harder for this country to actually have clean air, clean land and clean water.”

New Gear Could Keep California Crab Fishermen on the Water Longer, and Whales Safe

After years of a shortened crab fishing season aimed at preventing whale entanglements off the West Coast, California crabbers are experimenting with a new fishing method that allows them to stay on the water longer while keeping the marine mammals safe

After years of a shortened crab fishing season aimed at preventing whale entanglements off the West Coast, California crabbers are experimenting with a new fishing method that allows them to stay on the water longer while keeping the marine mammals safe.The state has been running a pilot program since 2023 to try out so-called pop-up gear to protect whales while finding a solution to fishermen's woes and is expected to fully authorize the gear for spring Dungeness crab fishing in 2026. The gear, which uses a remote device to pull up lines laid horizontally across the sea floor, also is being tried on lobster in Maine, black sea bass in Georgia and fisheries in Australia and Canada.“Unfortunately, it has been six years we've been delayed or closed early for whales,” said Brand Little, a San Francisco Dungeness crab fisherman who is among those participating in the pilot. "This is a way to get our industry back," he said.The effort comes after reports of whale entanglements off the Pacific Coast spiked a decade ago during a marine heat wave. The change in temperature drove whales, many of them threatened or endangered humpbacks, to seek out food sources closer to the California coast, where they were caught in vertical fishing lines that had been strung between crab pots on the ocean floor and buoys bobbing on the surface.In response, California state regulators barred Dungeness crab fishing when whales are known to be present. That shortened the season significantly, giving fishermen a narrow window in which to make a living. So some began trying pop-up gear and determined the method works and is worth the additional cost.The gear lets fishermen use a remote-operated, acoustic release device to pop-up a crab pot from the ocean floor rather than have it tethered to a floating buoy. Pots can be strung together with ropes laid horizontally instead of vertically, so whales can pass over them while migrating through the area.“If you remove the vertical line, you have removed the entanglement risk, and you have allowed a fishery to continue,” said Ryan Bartling, senior environmental scientist supervisor with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.Many long-time Dungeness crab fishermen have been slow to warm up to the idea due to the cost, which can run $1,000 per pop-up device plus an on-board unit. It also takes time to restring the pots after an intense winter season of derby-style fishing, which takes place when whales are calving in warmer waters to the south.There also is a need for a unified tracking system since the gear isn’t visible on the surface, Bartling said.More than four dozen whales were entangled in fishing nets in 2015, compared with an annual average of 10 in prior years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Many were humpback whales, which were listed as endangered in the 1970s and have been recovering since protections were put in place, the agency said.Environmental advocates sued California over the increased entanglements and reached a settlement with the state in 2019 that encouraged the use of ropeless gear.Bart Chadwick, who owns San Diego-based Sub Sea Sonics, said he previously used pop-up technology to retrieve expensive equipment while conducting environmental work at sea. When he retired from his job, he made tweaks so it could be adapted for fishing.“It allows them to fish in places they wouldn’t otherwise,” Chadwick said, adding the technology also reduces gear losses.Most Dungeness crab fishermen make their money during the early part of the season when whales typically aren't near the California coast. Experts say the pop-up gear won't work then due to crowding and the technology is currently being considered solely for the smaller spring season, which starts April 16 in central California.Geoff Shester, senior scientist at conservation organization Oceana, said he thinks the method could eventually be used more broadly if fishermen find it efficient and cost-effective.“Think about electric cars, or hybrids, or even digital cameras," Shester said. "Every time you have a new technology, there is a lot of resistance at first.”Crab fisherman Ben Platt said he was a vocal opponent but will join this year's pilot since multiple pots now can be strung together, making the method simpler and cheaper. Still, he said many fishermen have concerns and aren't likely to get on board.“We’ll just have to see and take a look at the results,” Platt said.For Stephen Melz, who fishes out of Half Moon Bay, California, having more time out on the ocean is key. Years ago, he said he would go out for Dungeness crab starting in November and fish through the spring.Now, with the shortened season, he said there is no room for error and the gear helps him get out so he can pay his bills.“Better than just sitting at dock,” he said.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

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