Slashdot Mirror
Robots To Clear the Baltic Seafloor of WW-II Mines
An anonymous reader writes "A Russian company is building a massive natural gas pipeline that will run across the Baltic Sea floor. But first, they must clear some of the 150,000 unexploded bombs sitting at the bottom of the sea, left there by the Russian and German armies in the 1940s. About 70 of these mines, each filled with 300 kg of explosive charge, sit in the pipeline's path, mostly in its northern section just south of Finland. And so the company contracted to remove the mines is bringing in robots to do the dirty work. Here's how it will work: A research ship deploys the robot to the seabed, where it identifies the exact location of the explosive. After sounding a warning to surrounding ship traffic, scaring fish away using a small explosive, and then emitting a 'seal screamer' of high intensity noises designed to make the area around the blast quite uncomfortable for marine mammals, Bactec's engineers erupt a 5 kg blast, forcing the mine to detonate. This process ensures the safety of humans plus any animals living in the surrounding environment. The operation concludes with the robot being redeployed to clear up the scrap of the now-destroyed bomb."
once again, The Man keeping the metalman down by only giving him the shitty jobs!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
One day robots will use humans to dispose of mines...won't be so funny then...
They get blown up. That kinda tends to happen when you put bombs in the water.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
There probably aren't a lot of plants that far down, but there would be lots of invertebrates. Poor invertebrates have all the bad luck. Perhaps one day they will learn the evolutionary advantage of being cute and furry.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
They'll grow back.
I hope that around 2050 we'll take care of Afghanistan, once Rwanda is done around 2035.
Uh.... If the mines don't explode when you blow up 5kg of TNT (or equivalent) right next to them, what exactly is the problem?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I suspect the dud rate will be pretty high. Trouble is, though, that when a single active mine could ruin your entire day, a chunk of your staff, and probably some expensive submersible hardware, you pretty much have to check.
5Kg of modern explosive will explode the mine even if the mine's explosives are inert. If there's no secondary explosion, the contents will be dissipated enough to make them harmless.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I can't believe they have opposition from ENVIRONMENTALISTS! Of all people, they should be the first to encourage the removal of mines. Frankly I would like to see all 150,000 removed, we have enough mines in our world we don't need them in the ocean as well.
Any pollution from the remains of these mines would only be temporary, the sea claims all things in the end and it will eventually filter out/destroy toxins on its own once its in flow is stopped. If its already heavily polluted they should focus their efforts on whatever is causing it before this.
Coral doesn't grow in the Baltic sea, though this probably isn't a great idea for some of the stationary shellfish in nearby costal waters.
And just what kind of reefs grow in brackish waters that freeze over in the winter?
Certainly, there aren't any corals in the region, except for hotels.
Hey, Mom! Is it beer, yet?
LOLZ. But what's the real difference between fish and cat meat?
Only a Chinaman would know.
"Although this decision is by no means unanimous, the Human feel that the seafloorlacks the necessary characteristics to take upon this task on their own," said Prostetnic Human Smith, a captain with the fleet. "Demolition will begin soon."
"As the proper paperwork has already been appropriately filed, resistance is useless!" Smith added. "This detonation had been discussed for several decades and the plans were available in a nearby continent for review and/or complaint. We regret the loss of lives, but we can't be blamed if you won't take the trouble to get out and get involved in your neighborhood"
The shock wave is not a problem, this is a problem.
Life isn't fair.
Seriously, what else are they going to do? If they try to reclaim the bombs and blow them up at another location, the project just got massively more complex, they are going to still damage the surrounding area when they dig it up and drag it away, the stuff that breaks if one goes off in-place just got a lot more expensive, you have the risk of someone getting hurt or killed during transport, and they've still got to blow it up somewhere. Some life forms are going to be extinguished when the bomb goes off, and no one in their right mind is going to design something to try and keep the bomb from going off. Unexploded ordinance is just nasty stuff that may or may not still be viable - the only effective way to make it safe is to let all the boom out of it.
They try to scare off all the critters they can, then they blow up the mine. It's as cheap, efficient, and about as minimally invasive as such a project could be. That's not to say it's not invasive, only that (short of transporter technology where we can beam it all into space) it's about as good as we're going to get.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Or just farm out the job to PETA they seem to have that angle covered.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Plants? WTF?! This is the bottom of the Baltic Sea, south of Finland, not a shallow coral reef in the Caribbean. There's no plants down there.
There's some very beautiful parts of the ocean, places where scuba divers and snorklers like to visit to see the pretty fish, coral, and underwater plants. The Baltic Sea is not one of these places.
So long and thanks, for all the fish....
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Probably not saturated. You may be thinking of gunpowder. People are still getting killed with WW I buried mines and shells.
Quoting Wikipedia: "TNT neither absorbs nor dissolves in water, which allows it to be used effectively in wet environments."
Let's say that only one out of twenty still work. Do you feel lucky? Exciting times.
Hey, Mom! Is it beer, yet?
Depends on the design and the filling. A thin steel shell would, indeed, probably have rusted, unless that particular patch of ocean is especially oxygen poor. With the right naval paint and a bit of luck, though, survival would certainly be possible.
Also, it is quite possible that the explosive agent in a fair few of these mines is Amatol. Because that stuff was hygroscopic, it was often given some sort of waterproof coating even if it was intended for land use, just so that it wouldn't go dud in storage. A basic coating of Bitumen could stand against seawater for quite a while, preserving the lump of possibly touchy explosive material even if the mine casing has been breached. Some of the period contact detonators, constructed largely of glass and lead, might also surive surprisingly well...
Are these mines that were intended to damage surface ships that sunk after time, or were they intended to get subs? Skimmed the article but didn't see that detail. Seems they're a bit too deep to be intended for surface ships, yeah?
One would think that after sitting at the bottom of the salty ocean for 60+ years it's shell would have rusted through and the explosives saturated with water.
IIRC, bombs and mines are often filled with a molten explosive such as TNT, which is then allowed to cool into a solid mass. It's not a given that simply exposing such a monolithic explosive to water would render it harmless.
Are you suggesting that the mines not be placed where they are? Very well. I'll call a meeting with Hitler and Stalin and see if we can get this un-done.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
They certainly are.
Here in the UK we often have a problem of unexploded ordinance and I would imagine countries like France, Germany et al. do also. Unexploded bombs in land or mines at sea dating back to World War II are usually found a few times a year here in the UK and are generally detonated because they are not safe to simply move, although some are safe enough to just move.
Don't be so quick to judge. There are such things as cold water and deep water corals. These even live in some parts of Norway.
The reason for them not living in the Baltic is that the water does not have enough salt. But in the parts close to the North Sea - the Skagerrak - several types have been found.
Coral reef ends at about 40 meters or so. I don't think anywhere on the Baltic Sea floor would qualify as prime coral reef territory for a large number of reasons, but depth is the first and most immediate that comes to mind.
And let's think about this for a second. They are doing the "boom-boom" thing to eliminate the bombs to make room for a natural gas pipeline. You might as well complain that the local contractor is using a weed-whacker to clear pretty flowers before he starts leveling the ground with a bulldozer. The amount of damage caused by these bombs going off is nothing compared to what's going to happen when the pipeline goes in.
And if you skip the mine-clearing step, just wait till the first mine goes off and releases a few million gallons of natural gas into the surrounding environment.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
"Dirty Jobs"... with Mike RoweBOT? (snare drum)
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
For a minute I read your post as this:
and I was going to vehemently disagree.
Eh, it's not as cool as you might think. I've found a screenshot of their software interface, looks pretty boring.
The whole point of setting off a bomb next to a bigger bomb is to ensure that any viable explosives will go off.
Large boom = the original bomb was a danger and the danger is gone.
Small boom = the original bomb had no viable explosive left so was never a danger in the first place.
Determining which are currently dead and which are still live is tricky. The cheapest, fastest, and safest way is to just blow them all up.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Or more explicitly, would *you* personally (the original poster) take the chance?
It is easier to wave away risk when someone else is taking it.
I was present when a plumber was fixing a small, on demand water heater wired directly to the mains so you could not unplug it. (probably a building code violation) I switched off power to the bathroom at the breaker box and told him it was off. The plumber asked: "Are you sure it's off?", I said yes, he said "Then you wont have a problem touching those terminals yourself."
At that point I grabbed my meter and verified it was off and then shorted the terminals with a screw driver to be doubly sure.
We've been using fertilizer as explosives for a long time, this really could help the plants.
Sounds good in theory, and as for practice, I have never seen quite as much greenery as the explosives range at the army base in Huntsville, at least as of the early 90s. Apparently nitrates and phosphorous are good for plants, who would have guessed? Also the equivalent of soil aeration could help on the ocean floor.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
>Was mining the sea a shortsighted endeavor that ultimately caused more harm than what was being prevented (invasion)?
Mines were, and continue to be, cheap and effective area denial weapons.
When used at sea, they ensnare the unwary, and, once the position of the minefield becomes known to your enemy, diverts enemy traffic into places more convenient for you.
This has been sufficient justification for their use for about a hundred years or so.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
The Vasa warship was preserved in the brackish waters a little way from Stockholm for over three hundred years. How long something lasts at the bottom of the sea depends on the composition of the water (oxygen, salt, etc) and other factors.
(If you visit Stockholm make sure you see the ship, it's amazing.)
I'm no munitions expert, but if I were to design a mine that was going to go into saltwater I might also select a material that is somewhat resistant to saltwater. PVC, polystyrene, bakelite, teflon, and polyurethane come to mind, and all were around before WWII. Heck, even stainless steel was around, albeit probably too expensive for the Russian military at the time. I wouldn't necessarily expect it to last 60 years, but if I designed it to be even minimally saltwater-resistant it's not outside the realm of possibility that one might survive that long. The odds are against it, but it's not impossible.
So you go with the odds, and relative levels of damage involved. This is prepwork for a very expensive natural gas pipeline, and I doubt it really accounts for a significant portion of the overall expense.
If no bombs are viable, then the project has spent some money unnecessarily and set off a series of 5kg (~11-pound) explosives and not done any real harm to the surrounding environment except for a bunch of little areas that are about to get a LNG pipeline plumbed through anyway.
If just one of those bombs is live and goes off when natural gas is flowing through the LNG pipeline they want to build, that could be very devastating over a very large area.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
A warning to anyone tempted to google for the article's intriguing term "seal screamer": the google search result pointing to Urban Dictionary's entry for "screamin' seal"-- while interesting in its own right, and marginally related-- is likely not the same phenomenon.
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
I guess you could call them shortsighted. But I also guess the times they lived in were a lot more desperate than yours. This is a situation where the mines that succeeded in their job caused more environmental devastation than the ones now sitting on the ocean bed (ever think about what a large ship is made of, not to mention its cargo?).
For many of these folks, the war was one of survival: you did what you needed to. Or would you not fire a gun at someone who intended you harm, out of worry about the lead in the bullet?
That campaign has the effect of making them 400% more delicious to Dwarf Fortress players.
There is also a lot of white phosphorous("false amber") coming from the Baltic sea. It is often confused with amber by locals and tourists and can cause severe burns. http://www.baltictimes.com/news/articles/15777/
"Approximately 100,000 km2 (38,610 sq mi) of the Baltic's seafloor (a quarter of its total area) is a variable dead zone." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Sea .. Right from wikipedia, guess there is less to worry about than one would think
"Unexploded ordinance is just nasty stuff that may or may not still be viable - the only effective way to make it safe is to let all the boom out of it."
For one of my projects, I was involved in unmanned aircraft activities at Fort Riley, KS, using an old weapons test range. Downrange was a tree line that we were warned to stay away from, and there were "UXO" signs around them. Apparently, trees had grown *around* unexploded ordnance, and that those trees were known to spontaneously explode. It was too dangerous to go out there, and they couldn't just bomb the land on base, so the Army just left that bunch of trees alone.
Those mines are still capable of detonating. As explosives age, they tend to become very unstable.
Swedish, german, danish and finnish underwater demolitions crews have been working on clearing areas together, and so far, in the last 6 years, 3 german divers have died(one diver got a cramp in his legs, attempted to straighten the leg and hit the seabed(Yes, the seabed, not the mine) with his flipper with a bit of force... the vibrations were enough to set off the mine 2m away ), 1 swedish and 1 finnish diver badly wounded(previously not found mine detonating in a sympathetic reaction as another mine was set off in a controlled blast). And those are just the casualties I know of.
Hell, a couple of years ago, a guy was killed by a *(US) Civil War* shell. And that was one that not only had sat either in water or the Virginia mud for nearly 150 years, it had been flushed with water to try to make it inert.
Obviously the Germans should be forced to pay war reparations...
The cheapest, fastest, and safest way is to just blow them all up.
That's your solution to everything.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I disagree, Peta protests are the best, There all about hot semi-naked chicks spouting on about something you could careless about.
Why take the risk? One lucky mine could ruin your whole day.
I lived in Charleston, SC for a while. It was not too unusual to dig up unexplosed ordinance from the Civil war; some of it was still dangerous.
Unless you want to die, treat all unexploded ordinance as dangerous; the older, the more dangerous.
The question is, do these invertebrates provide more value to the human species than the pipeline would? If they do not, it makes no sense for humans to protect them.
Plants require photosynthesis to get energy. That means they need light. Therefore, plants don't exist at deep depths. Most scuba divers will tell you that unless you're interested in diving for shipwrecks, there's really nothing worth looking at below about 40 feet (unless you're looking for unknown species, in which case you won't be scuba diving, you'll be in a deep-diving submersible and out in the open ocean diving to thousands of feet, not in the relatively shallow Baltic Sea).
But you definitely have a point with the waste and chemical weapons. Maybe they should clean some of that stuff up first, at least along the area where they're planning to put this pipeline.
As explosives age, they become less stable, and thus more likely to explode. Especially if they're not properly stored. Unexploded ordinance from WW II is still a big problem in many places.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,584091,00.html
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-05/04/content_439409.htm
The French still have problems with unexploded ordinance from World War I, which was mostly fought on their territory.
Hey now, we could at least let them sign the treaty at some place fancy, like Versailles.
The problem of unexploded ordinance goes back much further than World War I. In 2008, a guy was killed by a canon ball from the U.S. Civil War (140 year old ordinance) http://bit.ly/2O4M7j
Cat: C'mon buddy I'm not asking you to do anything I wouldn't do. Rimmer: You? You would sacrifice yourself for the good of the crew? Cat: No, I would sacrifice your life for the good of the crew.
every anarchist is a baffled dictator. Benito_Mussolini
wikipedia also says Solubility in water, 0.13 g/L (20 C). I knew a guy that had worked in a munitions plant, he said it was a big problem, TNT dust disolving in mop water, getting into the sewers and concentrating when the sewer dried out.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Add to this that we have plenty of nitrates and phosphorous in the baltic sea anyway dispite trying to regulate how close to the coast the farmers are aloud to grow plants (actually they get financial benefits for leaving a gap close to the shore). The problem in the baltic sea is not that the plants don't have enough fertilizer to grow, its that they have too much.