{"id":16137,"date":"2016-11-10T00:05:00","date_gmt":"2016-11-10T08:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/live-hakamagwp.pantheonsite.io\/features\/weapons-war-litter-ocean-floor"},"modified":"2019-08-15T10:23:51","modified_gmt":"2019-08-15T17:23:51","slug":"weapons-war-litter-ocean-floor","status":"publish","type":"custom_features","link":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/features\/weapons-war-litter-ocean-floor\/","title":{"rendered":"Weapons of War Litter the Ocean Floor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just before 10:10 on a warm summer night in 1917, German soldiers loaded a new type of armament into their artillery and began bombarding enemy lines near Ypres in Belgium. The shells, each emblazoned with a bright yellow cross, made a strange sound as their contents partly vaporized and showered an oily liquid over the Allied trenches.<\/p>\n

The fluid smelled like mustard plants, and at first it seemed to have little effect. But it soaked through the soldiers\u2019 uniforms, and eventually it began burning the men\u2019s skin and inflaming their eyes. Within an hour or so, blinded soldiers had to be led off the field toward the casualty clearing stations. Lying in cots, the injured men groaned as blisters formed on their genitals and under their arms; some could barely breathe.<\/p>\n

The mysterious shells contained sulfur mustard, a liquid chemical-warfare agent commonly\u2014and confusingly\u2014known as mustard gas. The German attack at Ypres was the first to deploy sulfur mustard, but it was certainly not the last: nearly 90,000 soldiers in all were killed in sulfur mustard attacks during the First World War. And although the Geneva Convention banned chemical weapons in 1925, armies continued manufacturing sulfur mustard and other similar armaments throughout the Second World War.<\/p>\n

When peace finally arrived in 1945, the world\u2019s military forces had a major problem on their hands: scientists did not know how to destroy the massive arsenals of chemical weapons. In the end, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States largely opted for what seemed the safest and cheapest method of disposal at the time: dumping chemical weapons directly into the ocean. Troops loaded entire ships with tonnes of chemical munitions\u2014sometimes encased in bombs or artillery shells, sometimes poured into barrels or other containers. Then they shoved the containers overboard or scuttled the vessels at sea, leaving spotty or inaccurate records of the locations and amounts dumped.<\/p>\n

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Nearly 175,00 soldiers from the United Kingdom and the British Empire were injured or killed by mustard gas during the First World War, including these bandaged Canadians. Photo by Shawshots\/Alamy Stock Photo<\/p><\/div>\n

Experts estimate that one million tonnes of chemical weapons lie on the ocean floor\u2014from Italy\u2019s Bari harbor, where 230 sulfur mustard exposure cases have been reported since 1946, to the US east coast, where sulfur mustard bombs have shown up three times in the past twelve years in Delaware, likely brought in with loads of shellfish. \u201cIt\u2019s a global problem. It\u2019s not regional, and it\u2019s not isolated,\u201d says Terrance Long, chair of the International Dialogue on Underwater Munitions (IDUM), a Dutch foundation based in The Hague, Netherlands.<\/p>\n

Today, scientists are looking for signs of environmental damage, as the bombs rust away on the seafloor and potentially leak their deadly payloads. And as the world\u2019s fishing vessels trawl for deep-diving cod and corporations drill for oil and gas beneath the ocean floor and install wind turbines on the surface, the scientific quest to locate and deal with these chemical weapons has become a race against the clock.<\/p>\n

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On a rainy day in April, I hop a tram to the outskirts of Warsaw to meet Stanislaw Popiel, an analytical chemist at Poland\u2019s Military University of Technology. An expert on the world\u2019s submerged chemical weapons, the graying researcher takes more than an academic interest in sulfur mustard: he has seen the dangers of this century-old weapon close up.<\/p>\n

I had hoped to visit Popiel in his Warsaw lab, but when I contacted him a day earlier by phone, he apologetically explained that it would take weeks to get the permissions necessary to visit his lab in a secure military complex. Instead, we meet in the lobby of a nearby officers\u2019 club. The chemist, wearing a rumpled gray blazer, is easy to spot among the officers milling around in starched, drab green dress uniforms.<\/p>\n

Leading me upstairs to an empty conference room, Popiel takes a seat and opens his laptop. As we chat, the soft-spoken researcher explains that he started working on Second World War sulfur mustard after a major incident nearly 20 years ago. In January 1997, a 95-tonne fishing vessel named WLA 206 <\/em>was trawling off the Polish coast, when the crew found an odd object in their nets. It was a five- to seven-kilogram chunk of what looked like yellowish clay. The crew pulled it out, handled it, and set it aside as they processed their catch. When they returned to port, they tossed it in a dockside trash can.<\/p>\n

The next day, crew members began experiencing agonizing symptoms. All sustained serious burns and four men were eventually hospitalized with red, burning skin and blisters. The doctors alerted the authorities, and investigators took samples from the contaminated boat to identify the substance and then traced the lump to the city dump. They shut down the area until military experts could chemically neutralize the object\u2014a chunk of Second World War sulfur mustard, frozen solid by the low temperatures on the seafloor and preserved by the below-zero winter temperatures onshore.<\/p>\n

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Disposing of chemical weapons at sea was a common practice until the 1970s. The US Navy dumped thousands of tonnes of mustard gas into the ocean all along the Atlantic coast. Here, a forklift pushes one-tonne containers overboard. Photo by US Army Photos\/AP Images<\/p><\/div>\n

A sample made its way to Popiel\u2019s lab, and he began studying it to better understand the threat. Sulfur mustard\u2019s properties, Popiel says, make it a fiendishly effective weapon. It\u2019s a hydrophobic liquid, which means it\u2019s hard to dissolve or wash off with water. At the same time, it\u2019s lipophilic, or easily absorbed by the body\u2019s fats. Symptoms can take hours or, in rare instances, days to appear, so victims may be contaminated and not even realize they have been affected; the full extent of the chemical burn might not be clear for 24 hours or more.<\/p>\n

A chemist in Popiel\u2019s lab discovered firsthand how painful such a burn could be, after a fume hood pulled vapors from a test tube full of the stuff up over his unprotected hand. The gas burned part of his index finger, and it took two months to heal\u2014even with state-of-the-art medical care. The pain was so severe that the chemist sometimes couldn\u2019t sleep more than a few hours at a time during the first month.<\/p>\n

Popiel explains that the more he read about sulfur mustard after the WLA 206<\/em> incident, the more he began to question why it had survived so long on the ocean floor. At room temperature in the lab, sulfur mustard is a thick, syrupy liquid. But under controlled lab conditions, pure sulfur mustard breaks down into slightly less toxic compounds like hydrochloric acid and thiodiglycol. Bomb makers reported that sulfur mustard evaporated from the soil within a day or two during warm summer conditions.<\/p>\n

But it seemed to remain strangely stable underwater, even after the metal casing of the bombs corroded. Why? To gather clues, Popiel and a small group of colleagues began testing the WLA 206 <\/em>sample to identify as many of its chemical constituents as they could. The findings were very revealing. Military scientists had weaponized some stocks of sulfur mustard by adding arsenic oil and other chemicals. The additives made it stickier, more stable, and less likely to freeze on the battlefield. In addition, the team identified more than 50 different \u201cdegradation products\u201d that formed when the chemical weapon agent interacted with seawater, sediments, and metal from the bomb casings.<\/p>\n

All this led to something that no one had predicted. On the seafloor, sulfur mustard coagulated into lumps and was shielded by a waterproof layer of chemical byproducts. These byproducts \u201cform a type of skin,\u201d says Popiel, and in deep water, where temperatures are low and where there are few strong currents to help break down the degradation products, this membrane can remain intact for decades or longer. Such preservation in the deep sea had one possible upside: the coating could keep weaponized sulfur mustard stable, preventing it from contaminating the environment all at once.<\/p>\n

Some of the world\u2019s militaries did dump their chemical weapons in deep water. After 1945, the US military required that dump sites be at least 1,800 meters below the surface. But not all governments followed suit: the Soviet military, for example, unloaded an estimated 15,000 tonnes of chemical weapons in the Baltic Sea, where the deepest spot is just 459 meters down and the seafloor is less than 150 meters deep in most places\u2014a recipe for disaster.<\/p>\n