A team of researchers studying an 80-year-old shipwreck in the North Sea have found that the ship, which was sunk by a bomb during World War II, is leaking hazardous pollutants onto the ocean floor.
The ship was the V-1302 John Mahn, a German fishing trawler that the Nazis used as a patrol boat. The British Royal Air Force bombed and sunk the vessel in 1942. According to a recent study, the wreck that has spent the better part of a century on the seafloor is leaking toxic pollutants into the water.
The research team in Belgium recently took samples from the steel hull and the sediments surrounding the wreck and found that heavy metals and explosives have leaked out. Their research is published in Frontiers in Marine Science.
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“While wrecks can function as artificial reefs and have tremendous human story-telling value, we should not forget that they can be dangerous, human-made objects which were unintentionally introduced into a natural environment,” said Josefien Van Landuyt, a microbial ecologist at Ghent University and the study’s lead author, in a Frontiers release.
Read more: Gizmodo
