Clean up sea-dumped munitions.

Defusing the Baltic Sea’s ‘ticking time bomb’

Brussels hopes to speed up efforts to clean up sea-dumped munitions.

BY ANTONIA ZIMMERMANN

This sleepy port city on Lithuania’s Baltic coast still bears the scars of its strategic wartime role. 

A walk through its historic center leads to the square where Adolf Hitler in 1939 announced the surrounding region's annexation to Nazi Germany; there are countless reminders of the later Soviet occupation.

But one relic of the last century’s world wars remains hidden to those strolling along the harbor or sunbathing on nearby beaches — hundreds of thousands of munitions dumped into the sea and now causing environmental havoc.

More than 300,000 chemical and conventional weapons, dating back to World War I and II, have turned the Baltic Sea, a crucial waterway and Europe’s most polluted sea, into what scientists and campaigners describe as a "ticking time bomb."

The munitions corroding on the seabed are causing cancer in local fish and seafood populations, also posing a risk to people consuming them. Experts warn that climate change could cause the weapons to corrode faster, compounding the problem.

In Lithuania, authorities so far been slow to tackle issue, partly because they lack up-to-date data and funding. But conservationists also bemoan a lack of urgency.

The issue “needs higher attention on the political agenda” and support from "concrete public funding,” said Žymantas Morkvėnas, director of Baltic Environmental Forum Lithuania, an NGO.

Under pressure from environmentalists across Baltic Sea countries, momentum is growing to accelerate clean-up efforts. In February, Germany — which is disproportionately affected by munitions dumped in its waters — kicked off its work on a €100 million program to pilot ammunition recovery and destruction with a conference in Berlin.

Brussels hopes to encourage other countries to follow suit with a conference in Palanga, a coastal town north of Klaipėda, later this month where it hopes to start a "common project" to facilitate data collection and exchanges among experts on how best to remove the old ammunition.

"Hopefully the time has finally come" to make a "significant improvement" by pooling resources among countries around the Baltic Sea, Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius told POLITICO, pointing out that the "alarming state of unexploded munitions" could slow the rollout of offshore wind projects in the area.

Long overdue, but lacking data

Scientists warn that little is known about where exactly the munitions lie and what condition they're in.

Walking along the deck of a research vessel one scorching morning in August, Galina Garnaga-Budre, the director of the Lithuanian Environmental Protection Agency’s Klaipėda office, said it has been 10 years since the agency had last examined the water around a chemical munition dumpsite that lies partly in Lithuanian waters.

New sampling, she said, is overdue to understand the real scope of the issue.

Allied forces — in a hurry to get rid of unused weaponry at the end of World War II — dumped some 40,000 tons of chemical munitions — containing about 15,000 tons of chemical warfare agents at the time — at designated sites in the Baltic.

But dumping also took place en route to those sites, meaning munitions are scattered across the entire sea floor.

On top of that come hundreds of thousands tons of conventional munitions — mines deployed in the Baltic in both world wars, as well as bombs, torpedo heads and shells. 

Experts worry that the environmental risks will worsen the longer those munitions are left alone, leading to calls for authorities to accelerate efforts to remove them.

Jacek Bełdowski, a researcher at the Polish Academy of Sciences, warned that "anything that accelerates corrosion may cause greater damage to our environment,” urging authorities to undertake "active efforts to decrease the probability of disaster."

According to Brenner, the marine biologist, authorities should prioritize munitions that are in a bad state and located in vulnerable environments — but that is “rather difficult to implement” without accurate data.

Currently, munitions that pose a threat to shipping or infrastructure projects such as offshore wind are removed in a costly process that involves defusing them and sending them to a disposal facility for destruction. When that's not possible, munitions are blown up — a practice scientists and campaigners oppose due to environmental impacts and risks for marine mammals. 

In 2019, a NATO operation with participation of the German navy caused outrage by detonating 42 sea mines in a marine protected area in the western Baltic Sea without involving nature conservation authorities and without taking noise protection measures — killing at least 10 porpoises. 

Inching toward action

Campaigners have welcomed Berlin’s efforts to accelerate clean-up efforts after years of slow progress.

In its coalition agreement, Germany's current government vowed to set up a program to remove munition waste from its seas. While the program is still in its early stages, discussions currently revolve around trialing a floating mobile disposal facility — an unmanned, video-controlled collection device — that would recover ammunition waste, make it harmless and dispose of it.

As a result of its role in both world wars, Germany is “partly responsible” for the issue, said Kim Cornelius Detloff, marine protection lead at conservation group NABU. “And in that respect, I think it's good that Germany, after decades of hesitation, is now taking on a bit of a pioneering role, both technically and politically.”

But ultimately, the issue can only be solved in cooperation with other countries — and with time.

While “countries can be sluggish,” the issue “cannot be addressed overnight” as it requires "a lot of research" and "a lot of knowledge," said Rüdiger Strempel, executive secretary of the Helsinki Commission, an intergovernmental organization meant to protect the Baltic Sea from pollution.

The Baltic Sea is “blindly unconcerned by any borders that we might have drawn across it,” he added.