Finding Unexpected Ordnances on the Seafloor With Passive Samplers
CEE Associate Professor Loretta Fernandez is working to develop passive samplers to locate munitions dumped into oceans decades ago during World Wars I and II, while also studying the potential toxicities of these weapons as they have degraded over time.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Tanner Stening. Main photo: Swiss officials have solicited researchers for ideas to help clean up munitions in deep lakes. Photo by Getty Images Lakescape of Lake Lucerne, Burglen Town in nidwalden canton, Switzerland.
Unexploded ordnances still litter the seafloor worldwide. Northeastern engineers are trying to sniff them out.
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.
Other explosive compounds, such as cyclonite or hexogen (RDX) and octogen (HMX), are less well-studied, Fernandez says, but potentially just as hazardous.
She’s studying how those (and other) munitions compounds degrade.
“What we know less about is what they transform into and how toxic those degradation byproducts are,” she says.
Different organisms, different toxicities
Those toxic chemical corollaries, Fernandez says, affect different organisms in different ways. It’s a growing area of research that can help scientists and authorities determine how urgent the task of munitions removal really is in the world’s water bodies. Switzerland, for example, has been analyzing its lakes’ water and sediment for more than a decade to ensure that leftover munitions are not harming its fragile ecosystems.
“As they start leaching into the water, there have been a lot of studies looking at the toxicity,” Fernandez says. “Who are these components toxic to? How long do they last? How quickly do they degrade in water?”
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