-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.<p>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.)<p>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.<p>Sigh.
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".<p><a href="https://acoup.blog/2019/10/18/collections-the-battlefield-after-the-battle/" rel="nofollow">https://acoup.blog/2019/10/18/collections-the-battlefield-af...</a>
Just last week, someone found a unexploded grenade from WWI there : <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/p09il7/grenade_d%C3%A9couverte_au_d%C3%A9tour_dun_sentier/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/p09il7/grenade_d%C3...</a><p>It just goes to show the scale of the war when even after 100 years it is still common to find unexploded ammunitions.
In Ypres, Belgium there is still a measurable increase of copper in the soil. This was investigated by a Belgian university in 2008 [0].<p>More anecdotal evidence is that you'll often see old ammunition next to freshly plowed fields.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.ugent.be/bw/environment/en/research/orbit/ww1/ovam_zware_metalen_ieper_wo1-pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.ugent.be/bw/environment/en/research/orbit/ww1/ov...</a>
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.
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.
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.
There is an "Iron Harvest" by Belgian and French farmers each year after plowing their fields.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest</a>
Previous discussion on similar article: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16936769" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16936769</a>
The damage caused by war (and industrial exploitation) is horrific. Yet there is precious little literature about the after-effects.<p>For instance, here are articles about two major WW1 battles:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Belleau_Wood" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Belleau_Wood</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Delville_Wood" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Delville_Wood</a><p>The battles are described in detail, but the devastation caused to woodland itself - a complex system of soil, vegetation, fauna - is <i>not even an afterthought</i>.<p>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.<p>All the other life in the woodland depends on the soil and vegetation. Contamination works its way through the entire ecosystem - definitely <i>not</i> charming.<p>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 <i>unthinkable</i> to put men and machinery into pristine natural environments as part of a strategy of human conflict.