Posted just for fun; this isn't a new discovery, but reports about it surface intermittently. I would love for it to be a UFO, but have no belief that that's what it is. But I do love oceans, and treasure stories, and anomalous discoveries.
The Baltic Sea is a literal treasure trove for salvage teams and a "shipwreck laboratory" for researchers. The sea's low salinity levels help preserve objects that sink to the bottom. "Right now, we know about 20,000 objects, mostly shipwrecks, in the Baltic Sea. But I think there may be more than 100,000," said sonar expert Ardreas Olsson.
In the '30s and early '40s, the Germans were known to have test-fired V-1s and V-2s into the Baltic.
ReplyDeleteIt's the low oxygen levels (not salt levels) that inhibit decay.
ReplyDeleteAre you sure about that? Low oxygen levels certainly apply to preserving artifacts in the Black Sea, but here's what I found this morning re the Baltic:
DeleteThe Baltic Sea's salinity is much lower than that of ocean water (which averages 35‰), as a result of abundant freshwater runoff from the surrounding land, combined with the shallowness of the sea itself; indeed, runoff contributes roughly one-fortieth its total volume per year, as the volume of the basin is about 21,000 km³ and yearly runoff is about 500 km³. The open surface waters of the central basin have salinity of 6 to 8 ‰. At the semi-enclosed bays with major freshwater inflows, such as head of Finnish Gulf with Neva mouth and head of Bothnian gulf with close mouths of Lule, Tornio and Kemi, the salinity is considerably lower. Below 40 to 70 m, the salinity is between 10 and 15 ‰ in the open Baltic Sea, and more than this near Danish Straits.
I didn't find anything re preservation of objects, but maybe the low salinity doesn't allow wood-boring worms to live there, for example. And this sentence -
An important source of salty water are infrequent inflows of North Sea water into the Baltic. Such inflows, important to the Baltic ecosystem because of the oxygen they transport into the Baltic deeps...
- would suggest that low oxygen levels are not present.
(Wikipedia is the source for the above citations)
Delete...the Millenium Falcon...?
ReplyDelete