02/09/2024
“If you ever come across anything suspicious like this item, please do not pick it up, contact your local law and/or enforcement agency for assistance”.
The two world wars that took place during — and in many ways defined — the 20th century left a legacy of trauma and devastation that’s echoed throughout the years. But the threat of those old weapons persists in the form of unexploded ordnances, which litter many of the world’s oceans. In the North and Baltic seas, the problem is so complex that German officials have deployed remote-controlled seabed crawlers and robots to remove old weapons that release toxic chemicals in the water. In recent weeks, Swiss officials began soliciting researchers for ideas to help them clean up munitions in deep lakes, offering a cash prize of $58,000 to the top three entries in a competition. That’s where Loretta Fernandez, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern University, comes in. Fernandez and her colleagues have been working on creating passive samplers that would allow them to locate these munitions by detecting degraded compounds in the water. There’s the explosive threat,” Fernandez notes, “like what happens if it comes up in someone’s fishing net and it explodes, because some of them are armed.” And then there are the less obvious threats, like the environmental fallout from the chemical breakdown of munitions over decades. An explosive compound widely manufactured and used during World War I, trinitrotoluene (TNT), for example, has been shown to be toxic to human beings. When TNT-based explosives degrade, they release chemical byproducts that can harm aquatic ecosystems and pollute soil.
Biography of a Bomb
Dear editors, Biography of a bomb is aimed at highlighting the danger caused by unexploded bombs. Moreover, the most important aspect is that we work completely non profit, what drives us is raising awerness about this topic. We make use of your pictures and articles, but we need them to put a context in how findings are done. We trust in your understanding. We will (and we always do) cite the source and the author. We thank you for your comprehension.
