Mystery surrounds lost German sea data station

This might sound like a flippant question, but I'm genuinely curious: how do you know all this? Are you a keen fan of modern naval warfare and keep abreast of it all, or do you work in the industry somehow?

Also remember that google has been building autonomous submarine robots for a few years in alameda... with unknown sensor capabilities....

I agree that it sounds like a military op, but why assume it was the Russians? This was a civilian station. If it had any sort of listening/detection capabilities those would be a threat to all military operations, irrespective of national origin. The americans, the brits, the germans, the russians, any one of them could have taken issue with this rig.

But I think it far more likely that this was a military accident. Someone dragged an anchor, net or towed sonar array over this thing. They might not have appreciated what had happened until days/weeks afterwards.

>Perhaps the Russians wished to transfer nuclear submarines to the Baltic to upgrade their fleet

while I generally agree with you and wouldn't put anything past my old country, even outright intentional stealing of the station,I don't think it is nuclear submarine here. It is too big of a fish to operate efficiently in the Baltic "tadpool"(http://ocean.dmi.dk/models/figs/bshcmod.png), and it doesn't provide any meaningful capabilities for that battle theater. From the USSR times Russia has the Baltic covered with more than enough antiship/antisubmarine/cruise missiles and other weaponry (like the short range ballistic missiles plus medium range cruise missiles which violated that treaty) which are based on land, on aircraft and on small ships, frigates and destroyers there. Nuclear submarine really doesn't add anything here. Despite all that hardware, Russia has been beefing ups its capabilities there - a lot of the ships were made operational (they hadn't been really despite their official "operational" status) plus the above mentioned new deployments of the ballistic and mid-range cruise missiles plus new generation of antiship and antisubmarine missiles (on smaller faster cheaper ships), and also i think the smaller submarine drones. These drones are much more probably at the issue here than a nuclear sub. There is also other submarine drone type - the nuclear powered and armed "doomsday" drone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status-6_Oceanic_Multipurpose_... . It is most probably built in St Petersburg and transferred to the North and Pacific fleets. While such transfers are usually with cold reactor and without warhead, there still may be some intelligence related drama around it.

>The rumour is that they're significantly upgrading their Baltic submarine fleet.

Russian rumors and threats of upgrades and military spending are a time honored tradition, with the exception of some specific projects that are not modernization at scale... the threats and rumors usually come to nothing.

"No boats - not even local fishing boats - are allowed into the area, called Eckernförde Bay, about 70km (44 miles) south of the Danish border."

Seems like a risky place to go trawling.

I grew up on an island in the Baltic. Cable lines to main land snapped by anchor dragging was a surprisingly common occurrence. Other marine shenanigans included drunken sailors beaching their ships because they forgot to turn around the island. And ofcause a ton of illegal fishing.

Your conclusion seems most likely in my book.

Agreed. Bottom trawling was the first thing I thought of. The machinery is probably relatively nearby, possibly with shreds of net caught in it, sitting on the bottom.

This is my bet as well.

Two units connected by a cable, weighing a combined 1700 pounds, both dragged away by accident? I have a hard time imagining that. In an accident where something on the surface snags it, I can see one of the units getting pulled away and the cable snapping, but both seems unlikely, at least for an anchor. Granted, I don't know much about what a trawl net looks like in the water or how much weight it can hold.

why don't they put accoustic retroreflectors (perhaps with a tailored high q resonant frequency response on it) on the thing?

then its just a question of raising the signal from the noise floor at different locations to locate it...

Except it turns out it's actually a heist movie, and they stole it at the beginning of the movie.

Who knows, maybe a giant octopus was looking for an easy snack.

There are some restricted zones. German, but if you click on the map, you will get an idea: https://mein-ostseehafen.de/seegebiete/schleswig-holstein/sc...

The German source article is a bit more specific: They are talking about the exclusion zone "Hausgarten" near the Camping ground Hökholz.

https://map.openseamap.org/?zoom=15&lat=54.54194&lon=10.0440...

It doing climate science is plenty of reason for some people to want it to disappear.

Yeah, as a German, I doubt our ability to place fancy surveillance stuff or other military projects onto the seabed.

You would have to dive to cut the cable. Easier, if your boat is powerful enough, to pull until the cable breaks. Ignoring malicious activity, could be something as simple as an anchor got caught and they pulled the station with it?

It cost 300k, but I can't imagine there's a huge blackmarket for fencing sea-water salinity monitors and the like, so I doubt stealing it would be worth anyones trouble.

They would probably just have taken the cable and left the station.

Except there haven't been severe storms in the area since 21 August.

The current administration is pro science.

It might also have been abducted by aliens, but it's not constructive to suggest something with a 0% probability, when rounded.

It seems like submarines splicing spy equipment into undersea cables is their biggest peace time application - and it looks like every country that can do it, does it in some form or other. It just came to light that South Africa is doing that, and they can barely keep the lights on as a nation. If a basket-case like South Africa does it, probably every developed nation does it.

It would be far from the first time somebody's science or fishing vessel was spying on someone else.

But would it would be the first time the US has interfered with an ally's spy rig? Five eyes, and all that, it's in our interest, right?

Maybe someone else messed with it.

It's extremely unlikely the US would do something like that to an ally. In regards to 'spying' in general, usually you don't really sabotage. You just note what's being collected and control it. Because by sabotaging something you give away that you know about it, that is has value, that you're possibly actively looking for similar things, blah blah.

I would bet money that someone dragged an anchor across the line or the device, and it has since been dragged across the sea floor to an unknown location by accident.

I think the Bay (Eckernförde) is so small and shallow that any US Submarine would have been spotted immediately.

Highly unlikely. Those waters are too shallow for any US-Submarines (Or british) to operate in. And its one of the prime hunting grounds for german submarines, which are based in the Area. Much too risky.

I didn't downvote you, however the problem with your reasoning is that every country has literally hundreds of devices scattered around and measuring every day data that could make someone unhappy. The current US administration (which I deeply dislike as well) would gain nothing but the great risks involved should the agents be caught with the pants down. While they could well sabotage a few stations, there are so many around that hitting all of them is plain impossible. If we accept your theory, we should also take into account Russia as well since this happened about two weeks after that nuclear incident, and having sensors measuring radiations far away from the event would make them unhappy too. I'm assuming that station has radiation sensors on board although their presence has not been reported because they're cheap and it would be stupid not to include them especially in that area. Same problem as above: let's say some Russian agents managed to destroy that station, how would they deal with the hundreds or thousands other stations doing similar measurements around without risking a lot of PR damage if caught?

To me, assuming it was intentional, it was either someone needing spare parts for his projects (kidding) or someone who didn't want measurements to be taken in that area because they are involved in illegal dumping of pollutants or similar things.

edit: knowing the exact type of sensors on board would help a lot to find the motivations in case of deliberate sabotage; eg, a magnetometer can detect anomalies in Earth's magnetic field, such as those produced by big ships or submarines passing by.

Climate deniers have managed to ignore inconvenient, extensive data for decades. I doubt they see a need to perform an act of war to prevent a trickle of additional data.

The current US administrations tact is "the science is wrong" or "the science is being misinterpreted". Why go to the trouble of some cloak and dagger mission when you can simply ignore it.

Trump is not Der Kinderlumper.