CONMAR
Concepts for Conventional Marine Munition Remediation in the German North Sea and Baltic Sea
Federal Ministry of Education and Research
01.12.2021 bis 30.11.2024
Coastal waters around the world are contaminated with munitions. In the German part of the North Sea and Baltic Sea alone, there are about 1.6 million tons of discarded munitions or unexploded ordnances. The distribution and condition of the munitions are not sufficiently known. In addition to the explosion and safety risk these munitions pose, conventional explosives and chemical warfare agents contain cytotoxic, genotoxic and carcinogenic chemicals.
With the increasing development of offshore infrastructure, such as aquaculture, wind farms, cables and pipelines, interest in the investigation and disposal of underwater munitions has also increased. In the coalition agreement, the German government committed to setting up an immediate program to pilot munitions salvage and destruction, and provided funding of 100 million euros for this purpose.
The goal of the CONMAR collaborative project is to integrate existing and new datasets on historical marine munitions, to combine the expertise and knowledge of German marine science organizations, government agencies, and the private sector to advance our scientific understanding of the role, fate, and effects of munitions in the marine environment, and to provide policy solutions for monitoring and remediation in coordination with stakeholders.
At the Chair of Ocean Engineering, the release, transport, and transfer of explosives into the water column are studied in this context. This includes evaluating the mobilization of munitions due to ocean currents and swells, the physical decomposition of munitions, and the transport of explosive particles by ocean currents. Laboratory-scale experiments will be used to develop models that will be used by project partners in large-scale simulations of ocean currents and verified by field investigations. In this context, we are running an experiment in the Digital Ocean Lab off the coast of Nienhagen to study the mobilization of munition-like objects under the influence of sea state and ocean currents.
