Plants, heavy metals, and the lingering scars of World War I | Hacker News Reader

Plants, heavy metals, and the lingering scars of World War I

atlasobscura.com

137 pointsbcaulfield55 comments

-After WW2, the victorious allies dumped loads - as in, hundreds of thousands of tons - of surplus German ammunition in Norwegian waters, mostly simply by loading up old freighters with the ammo, steaming into deep waters and sinking them there.

The result? We now find traces of toxins in fish caught off the dumping grounds (Mostly in the Skagerrak between Denmark and Norway, but also in the fjord right outside my office on the northwestern coast.)

While dilution is a wonderful thing, I am a bit peeved that my nautical maps still show areas which are off-limits to fishing, be it recreational or professional, due to a metric shitload of mustard gas and tabun being dumped there, with a healthy sprinkling of conventional high-explosives on top just to make sure we'd never be able to clean it up properly.

Sigh.

There is also mustard gas dumped in the north sea near knokke, in rusting vats. Near to one of the busiest shipping routes in the world.

Don't worry, citizen, it's not leaking much yet, go on holiday at the coast.

https://www.gremberghe.nl/2013/07/het-mosterdgas-voor-onze-k...

Thank god the new bombs are envirinmental friendly. I wonder why no one talks about them (state secrets ?). /s

-Well, there is such a thing as bio-degradable land mines in the works. [0]

(At least the idea was discussed years ago - whether it is implemented in current land mines, I've no idea.)

While mines are still an abomination, ensuring they are laid down with an expiry date is still progress. Of sorts. I am in the rather awkward position of hoping for development in the anti-personnel mine business - I've no illusions such an effective weapon will ever be obsolete, so the best we can hope for (sigh) is that they will at least not cause collateral casualties for decades after the conflict which caused them to be deployed in the first place.

[0] http://www.metts.com.au/landminesdoc.html

Here in Israel the Golan Heights are just filled with Syrian land mines from 50 years ago or more (Israeli mines too, but at least the army has the maps for them).

Sometimes a cow blows up or worse. The sad thing is that they get more, not less, dangerous over time. The reason is that they drift inside the terrain over the decades and they can get even in areas that were thought to be clear.

In fact putting a landmine is my pet example for something that is easy to do and terribly difficult to undo.

The film "A Perfect Day" [1] revolves around the Bosnian war zones, and one of the more interesting characters is an old grandma who walks her cow in front, and then steps exactly where the cow stepped for reasons you can probably guess. Lots of dark humor but the whole thing is a pretty sad affair unfortunately.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Perfect_Day_(2015_film)

> bio-degradable land mines in the works

Shame on those working in them, as this is solving the wrong problem. The Ottawa Treaty is signed by most the worlds countries, with the usual suspects have avoided doing so.

Your attitude is pragmatic, and likely the best that could be achieved.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty

TABITHA You've got to sign the land mine treaty, Toby.

TOBY Whoa... What happened to the nuance of diplomacy?

TABITHA Oh, sorry, the shoes are shined.

TOBY No we-we're there now, you-you can't go back.

TABITHA Sorry.

TOBY Right.

TABITHA 142 countries have signed it, 84 have ratified, 12 destroyed there entire stock.

TOBY Yes.

TABITHA You know who hasn't signed it? Us and Cuba.

TOBY You know who initiated it? Us. And the nations of the world rallied around it in yet another impressive display of American leadership.

TABITHA And then?

TOBY We bolted.

TABITHA Right.

TOBY And the reason we did is because we love anti-personnel land mines. We love 'em. And we think the government should be in the business of selling them, like the Post Office. In fact, the Post Office is the sales venue we've been considering.

TABITHA Toby. I-I got a...

TOBY It's Korea. Tabitha. There are 900,000 North Korean soldiers in the DMZ, and the only thing stopping them from walking into South Korea are 37,000 US troops, and about a million land mines along the border. We have said over and over that we would be thrilled to sign this treaty if we could have an exemption for South Korea and we have been rebuffed. Rebuffed... I say.

From The West Wing, Season 3 – Episode 16 – “The U.S. Poet Laureate”.

Generally speaking you don't have to worry that much about chemical weapons waste. Anything toxic enough and potent enough to incapacitate people on any militarily useful timeline needs to be pretty reactive with some subset of organic molecules. That pretty much always means that it readily makes bonds with something in the top few rows and right half of the periodic table. Likewise it will quickly find something in the environment to react with and become much less of a problem if you let it loose.

Heavy metals and exotic engineered chemicals that are only mildly toxic and/or are mostly nonreactive that can pass through the food chain or will not affect you immediately but build up is what you should worry about (agent orange, mercury, etc).

Oh, we've got quite some of that to go around, too. Wars are good for creating further problems down the line.

In the closing months of WWII, the German sub U-864 was sunk just off the island of Fedje in south-western Norway; among its cargo was 67 tons of mercury and scientific personnel - it was on its way to Japan to aid in the war effort.

The quicksilver is still there, slowly seeping out of the wreckage; good thing (as such things go...) quicksilver is heavy and insoluble in water. With any luck it seeps into the seabed before any marine life ingests it to find it is not insoluble in fat and tissue.

Another problem-- probably a much bigger one-- is the huge amount of mercury fulminate used in munitions throughout much of the 20th century. It's much more soluble and dispersible than native mercury, and there's a lot more of it in weapons dumps.

> Generally speaking you don't have to worry that much about chemical weapons waste...

This whole paragraph is gibberish. Some chemical warfare agents are vulnerable to hydrolysis, but only if the munition casing is compromised. However mustards are quite robust against environmental degradation; they have low volatility, they're hydrophobic, and they resist hydrolysis. Thus they appear to persist indefinitely even when the bare chemical is exposed to water. Read the news stories about fishermen being burned by blobs of mustard that were accidentally trawled from the sea floor, or people on beaches injured by random enounters with wandering bits of mustard.

And of course none of this matters as long as munitions are still intact, which will be the case for millions of hundred-year-old shells dumped at sea and buried on land for the foreseeable future.

> Heavy metals and exotic engineered chemicals...

Mercury is indeed a persistent pollutant that bioaccumulates. When you mention agent orange, I'm guessing you're talking about the dioxins that are supposed to have contaminated some batches of pesticides. However none of these are exotic engineered chemicals, and they certainly aren't "mildly toxic". While many old weapons dumps present a mercury hazard, they're dwarfed by the mercury pollution caused by coal-fired power plants. Dioxins aren't really relevant to weapon dumps; the vast majority of dioxin pollution (and chlorophenols in general) comes from burning of waste and industrial accidents.

I agree, the actions of our (or rather my) forbearers in dealing with man-made toxins were short-sighted and ill informed. They hadn't dealt with these new chemicals in such large quantities before and they probably didn't give a second through to the consequences of simply dumping them.

However I wonder if there is a silver lining in that by polluting those waters it has also protected them from overfishing? Much like Chernobyl's nature is flourishing, yet still not safely habitable by humans long term.

-Oh, I don't really blame our forbearers as such, they'd just spent a few years seeing the world being chewed up and now had to start rebuilding fast, I can see how 'Let's just dump this stuff out where it will affect no-one in our lifetime' made sense.

As for the silver lining, the restricted zones are probably way too small - in my local case, it is only a matter of a couple of square kilometers .

(The main concern probably not being that the catch is dangerous to eat, but rather that whatever fishing gear you use may recover to the surface with all sorts of exciting litter attached to it.)

Ah yes, i guess trawling would be really dangerous, and bottom trawling suicidal... which is an even bigger bonus to sea life than preventing overfishing.

Shame? it only benefits such a small area :D difficult to know which is more damaging.

You've hit on an interesting idea: anti-fishing mines. Maybe a bouyant explosive attached to a weight by a cable such that the depth is well below what a ship on the surface could interact with. Getting snagged in the net arms it to detonate when the ambient pressure drops to near atmosphere is it's being pulled on board...

Or, less lethally, and probably just as effective: Drop a bunch of concrete blocks on the sea floor designed to snag nets. You wouldn't even need that many to make fishing the area entirely unprofitable.

Unfortunately that might not be enough:

[0] > Trawling gear produces acute impacts on biota and the physical substratum of the seafloor by disrupting the sediment column structure, overturning boulders [...]

[1] > A bottom trawl consists of a large tapered net with a wide mouth and a small enclosed end. The mouth of a trawl net has two weighted doors that serve not only to keep the net open, but also to keep the net on the ocean floor. These doors can weigh several tons. In addition to the heavy doors, the bottom of the net is a thick metal cable (footrope) studded with heavy steel balls or rubber bobbins that effectively crush everything in their path [...]

Seems like the gear is designed to withstand a lot of punishment. I think the risk of hauling up something truly nasty probably works as a better disincentive, also doesn't actually need to be everywhere to be enough of a risk. e.g "this area is off limits, and btw we planted a bunch of depth sensitive bombs at undisclosed locations designed to be snagged by trawler nets."

It would probably be very effective, but i suspect also a bit too radical ... i mean lets call them what they are: fishing IDEs :P

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom_trawling#Environmental_...

[1] https://usa.oceana.org/bottom-trawling

I still feel like a gnarly shaped block of concrete should at the very least be able to catch the net.

Still, if you were to go for explosives, I'd probably make them explode as soon as the net tugs on em, instead of waiting for it to reach the surface. Wouldn't want to kill and/or maim random fishermen if it can be helped.

Fortunately, it's pretty likely that many of those toxins won't be particularly harmful in low doses; but the stress isn't good, that's for sure.

A similar (worldwide) problem are all the maritime shipwrecks stemming from that period: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727761-600-why-wart... https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-ticking-time-bomb-of-wwii-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP0U62oiBlM

Around the UK too. The North Channel between Scotland and Northern Ireland contains ~1,000,000 tons of munitions. It was supposed to be dumped in the deep channel, but in rough weather the boats would dump it a few hundred metres offshore [1]. Separately, 1500 tons of TNT is deteriorating in a grounded WWII ship just off Sheerness in the south-east of England [2]. I wouldn't live there!

[1]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14820042-200-the-ww2-... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery

I think the wreck in the Thames estuary is of genuine concern to the prospect of building a new airport for London on reclaimed land there. The ship would need to be dealt with before building the airport, which surely would require exploding it, which would in turn break windows 10s of km away. Building new international airports for major cities is already expensive before you consider that!

Tolkien fought in the trenches of WW1 and it left a mark on him. Mordor and the way orcs treat land are especially influenced by his experience. People started to call this type of landscape "moonscape".

https://acoup.blog/2019/10/18/collections-the-battlefield-af...

Just last week, someone found a unexploded grenade from WWI there : https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/p09il7/grenade_d%C3...

It just goes to show the scale of the war when even after 100 years it is still common to find unexploded ammunitions.

Farmers in France and Belgium plow up 900 tonnes of unexploded WWI munitions every year.

In the more dangerous 'zone rouge', no human activity except professional cleanup crews are allowed. It is estimated that at the current rate of progress the cleanup will be done in 300-700 years.

https://www.messynessychic.com/2015/05/26/the-real-no-go-zon...

Not to forget the abandoned mines in Belgium from the Messines campaign. Up to 20 tons of unexploded explosive per mine happily rotting under Belgium farms since 1917.

And all the bombs still found in Germany. And the mines in the Baltic. And in former Yugoslavia. And all the mines from the various wars in Africa. And the depleted uranium ammo from the Gulf War. And the stuff, mines and agent orange for example, left in East Asia.

Quite a long list of stuff to clean up.

In Ypres, Belgium there is still a measurable increase of copper in the soil. This was investigated by a Belgian university in 2008 [0].

More anecdotal evidence is that you'll often see old ammunition next to freshly plowed fields.

[0] https://www.ugent.be/bw/environment/en/research/orbit/ww1/ov...

Every year I am going on a tour through northern France and Italy to map old trenches and battlezones. We have a strict policy towards ammo. Last year we found tons of shells, helmets, hundreds of live bullets and grenades. Some say it will take another 900 years before most is gone.

Sounds like Visual Player 2.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtTDPmEywHE

Edit: sorry, this was supposed to be a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27998754

Thats the one :) awesome. Amazing that you found it. Thanks

I wonder if it is possible to remove the poisoned top soil, heat it up and melt the metal, and use fractional destillation to remove it. What's leftover is probably heavily damaged by the heath, but maybe nature can re use it as a basis for new and healthy top soil.

At those heats the soil would burn away.

If you heated the soil to that point, I think you would end up with sterilized soil (or even just ash) that wouldn’t be very good for growing much.

Very very very expensive.

The arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh mentioned in the piece is a real and serious problem, but it's also the side effect of meaningful progress. Some, but not all, of the wells built to stop a quarter of a million annual deaths from disease caused by collecting surface waters is the source of the arsenic poisoning.

What I understand the screw up there was not testing each well before putting it into potable water service.

It's not a new thing. My grandfather had a gig during the 1930's testing wells and springs for the USDA. My grandmother said a lot of wells and springs people were drinking from were contaminated with heavy metals and bacteria.

Years ago, I did a college paper on the Bangladesh arsenic poisoning. Short wells and deep wells are fine. It's medium depth wells that are the problem because they are all drawing water from a particular rock formation that contains arsenic.

No one knew that beforehand. Relief organizations went in to put a stop to a serious crisis. They succeeded. Then reports of arsenic poisoning began emerging.

There is an "Iron Harvest" by Belgian and French farmers each year after plowing their fields.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest

Previous discussion on similar article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16936769

I tell you what, the next proper war will leave scars for a lot longer than 100 years.

Scars imply healing; you can only look to the world after the industrial revolution to see how heavily wounded the planet has become.

The world can recover from a dozen Chernobyls and Fukushimas, but not so easily from a species that kills its defenses and continues to fight against it.

The damage caused by war (and industrial exploitation) is horrific. Yet there is precious little literature about the after-effects.

For instance, here are articles about two major WW1 battles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Belleau_Wood

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Delville_Wood

The battles are described in detail, but the devastation caused to woodland itself - a complex system of soil, vegetation, fauna - is not even an afterthought.

While it's charming that the color of flowers is affected by soil contaminants, the vegetation layer is just the base of the trophic levels that constitute an ecosystem.

All the other life in the woodland depends on the soil and vegetation. Contamination works its way through the entire ecosystem - definitely not charming.

I've been downvoted many times for my opinions, but the world needs a Geneva Convention that protects natural habitats in times of war. I would go further: this needs to reach a religious level of fervor, so that it would be unthinkable to put men and machinery into pristine natural environments as part of a strategy of human conflict.

Not having war is more likely than ecological qualms during one.

> the world needs a Geneva Convention that protects natural habitats in times of war

Don’t we have for example Protocol I of the Geneva Convention and also the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques.

The limitation of the Geneva Convention, and "International Law", is that there is nobody to enforce it, and there never will be. Such is the nature of laws, which are merely the ideas of some people about how other people should conduct themselves. For better or worse, who governs the seas is the outcome of wars.

-- Political Science 101

Right... so how would yet another Geneva Convention fix that?

Nothing will protect natural habitats in times of war, since war is the suspension of the compact of civilisation. The most you could hope for would be that the victors of your next war are environmentalists who are happy to spend whatever it takes to clean up the mess.

This might be an argument in favour of arming Greenpeace.

> this needs to reach a religious level of fervor, so that it would be unthinkable to put men and machinery into pristine natural environments as part of a strategy of human conflict.

It should be unthinkable to target civilians, destroy houses and people, rape and torture. And here we are, in modern wars.

It would be nice to make it unthinkable to have large organizations of soldiers all about killing, but here we are.

Bret Devereaux is of the opinion that chemical weapons are not in use anymore simply because they're ineffective next to simple explosives.

https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

Maybe the simplest way to save the environment is to invent more deadly, cost effective weapons that don't harm the land as a side effect?

> chemical weapons are not in use anymore

That’s got to be the most caveated statement in a blog post ever.

For anyone reading casually, I really hope you’re aware Russia deployed a chemical weapon against the UK in anger as recently as 2018.

Chemical weapons are used for assassination, but not for large scale warfare. More like terror weapons on civilians (Syria?) and guerilla fighters with limited resources and few alliances.

Someone will still decide to salt the earth with depleted uranium out of spite (see iraq) even if an effective alternative exists

Amount of depleted uranium used in the gulf war: 290 tonnes.

Amount of uranium (twice as radioactive as depleted uranium) in the top 1 meter of the soil of Iraq: ~2.6 million tonnes.

If you own a house with a yard, the soil probably contains multiple kilograms of uranium. It's not that uncommon an element.

> The damage caused by war (and industrial exploitation) is horrific. Yet there is precious little literature about the after-effects.

Because the rullers want to be able to justify war everytime they need it. Look in history books accessible to the masses. War is heroic, a fight between good and evil. No indescriminate killing, no destruction, no pollution. Only those who lost were the bad guys and those who win are good ( there are exceptions, see Afganistan and Vietnam for examples).

> For instance, here are articles about two major WW1 battles:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Belleau_Wood

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Delville_Wood

> The battles are described in detail, but the devastation caused to woodland itself - a complex system of soil, vegetation, fauna - is not even an afterthought.

There is also the idea that the effect of the war are punctual in time. In reality war are fought many years after the war officially ends (see bomb findings in europe or china vs taiwan in asia).

> While it's charming that the color of flowers is affected by soil contaminants, the vegetation layer is just the base of the trophic levels that constitute an ecosystem.

> All the other life in the woodland depends on the soil and vegetation. Contamination works its way through the entire ecosystem - definitely not charming.

Yes, but nobody knows about it.

> I've been downvoted many times for my opinions, but the world needs a Geneva Convention that protects natural habitats in times of war. I would go further: this needs to reach a religious level of fervor, so that it would be unthinkable to put men and machinery into pristine natural environments as part of a strategy of human conflict.

Geneva convention does not help. See guantanamo for examples.

> Geneva convention does not help

That's not true, the example of gitmo is an issue of the way that the treaty is worded not covering some situations. There are tons of horrifying things outlawed by the Geneva convention which have not happened since. See for instance the lack of massive battlefield use of chemical weapons in world war 2. The Ottawa treaty has had a similar effect on the use of landmines since.

We've made a lot of progress, don't despair because it's not perfect yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com