Fathoming chemical weapons in the Gotland Deep

Over 2 years have passed since we first heard about the seals. In late 2014, Aleksija had explained to us that seals incidentally caught in fishing gear off the coast of Sweden had been found – now dead – to have strange lesions around their eyes. As two scholars of gender, culture and science, with a particular interest in the watery transits of toxic pollutants, we were intrigued. As bodies both intimately attached to these Baltic waters, albeit in different ways, we were also deeply disturbed. With the precision of her pathological and biological training, Aleksija referred to these anomalies as mild abrasions or loss of pigment on the edges of eyelids: ‘Pink blinking through black’, she explained. In a few cases, the disturbances that Aleksija’s colleagues in the labs of the Swedish Museum of Natural History uncovered were less subtle: shallow craters where whiskers met skin, ulcers striating the smooth lining of the mouth and the oesophagus. But the funny thing about these signs of trouble in the water, she told us, was that they were overshadowed by non-signs: no trace of inflammation, no indication of tissue repair. In other words, while some elements of damage to the seals could be detected, evidence that might provide further clues to the causes or processes of this damage was either gone or undetectable. Injury was indexed by an absence of tissue, now insulted, eroded or simply washed away. There were no traces of chemicals in the tissues or organs, either. Nothing was conclusive.

What environmental concerns are swimming in the Gotland Deep?

In other words, the microscopic examination performed by Aleksija (as a wildlife pathologist of Sweden’s National Veterinary Institute) showed no definitive evidence that the lesions were caused by mustard gas. Yet, this possibility was what prompted the National Defense Research Institute to agree to analyse the tissues in the first place. Following World War II, Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and other Allied powers engaged in massive dumping of several hundreds of thousands of tons of chemical warfare agents (CWA) such as mustard gas, tabun and Lewisite in the planet’s oceans. Although the use of these weapons was largely restrained in World War II, the victors were still left with the problem of what to do with the massive stockpiles. The solution was the sea. After all, water has long been called upon to wash away our sins.

A large amount of European stocks thus now lie on the floor of the Baltic Sea. Most of the dumping in the 1950s happened by loading up entire ships with the missiles and bombs and canisters and scuttling them, Battleship-style. This is what they did outside Bornholm, in busy Kattegatt, as well as further up the saltier Swedish coast in Skagerrak and off the coast of Norway. The Gotland Deep was one of the most intense sites of dumping, off the south east coast of Sweden in the middle of the Baltic Sea. Here, the relinquishing was more like Hansel and Gretel – dropping the toxic crumbs, one after another, over the side of the boat, not only in but en route to the dumping site. In this way, they made maps in a benthic Braille, no longer entirely legible. No precise records exist of these operations, but a recent mapping (Figure 1) by CHEMSEA – an European Union (EU)-funded multilateral applied research project in the Baltic Sea area – suggests that more than 50,000 tons of munitions and chemical warfare leftovers were dumped near the island of Gotland. The majority of these stocks, CHEMSEA experts convey, comprise sulphur mustard, also known as mustard gas. At the time, this method of disposal was considered cheap and convenient, as the large amounts of water were believed to neutralize the CWA. Almost half a century later, however, CWA resurface in myriad ways – in fishermen’s nets, on beaches, in the news and, maybe now, on the faces of these dead seals.

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Figure 1.

Map of the dumping sites.

Now we’re here, the three of us – two humanities scholars and one scientist – in the middle of the Baltic Sea, on the southeastern limestone outcrop of Gotland Island. We came here together to try to make sense of the ways in which a tangled past of industrial chemistry, war and environmental short-sightedness still haunts these waters, with very material consequences for the lives still eking out an existence in and around this highly trafficked and toxic sea. We are at the closest terrestrial point to where those canisters filled with mustard gas might lie, but any sense of terra firma is belied by our tentative footing across the stony beach – those smooth rocks being picked up and reclaimed by the persistent tide. The harsh bite of the icy November wind almost tricks us into thinking that we are closing some distance between our fleshy bipedal selves and the hard chemical facts sunken in that inhospitable sea. Yet, our being here does not bring those toxic burial grounds any closer, or necessarily make them any more alive than they would be to us, sitting at our desks in Uppsala, Linköping or Sydney, Australia. Those drowned souvenirs of war are still many kilometres out, and then several deep. Our chances of stumbling upon an amber-like nugget of blistering poison are equally remote, which is both a relief (to a vulnerable body) and a kind of perverse disappointment (to a curious researcher).

In other words, despite being as close as we can get to these weapons dumps without literally accompanying the fishing vessels or the CHEMSEA submersibles, comprehending them is still a fraught act of disciplined extrospection. ¹ This difficulty is punctuated by the waves’ repeated refusal of our overtures of intimacy; the sea as watery archive indeed seems unfathomable. Yes, CWA are becoming increasingly detectable across the shallow sea floor with the help of echo sound and remote sensing, just as ocean sensing technologies are making marine spaces increasingly measurable by and legible to landlubbing humans. Fathoming the sea, however, also demands a concomitant imaginary – and the idea of CWA lying in wait beneath these waves requires more than the representations from prosthetic data machines can muster. We hold out hope for knowledge of what lies beneath but we humans can only ever go there partially, temporarily and by proxy. This may indeed be true of all knowledge pursuits (what object, after all, gives itself over to exhaustive conquest?) but here, at the edge of the Gotland Deep, these epistemological challenges literally lap our boots with their cold fingers (Figure 2). Even for the heartiest of cold water bathers, a swim seems out of the question.

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Figure 2.

The Baltic Sea, looking out from Gotland Island.

The chemical life of waterlogged mustard gas, and the threat it poses, is similarly uncertain. When used in terrestrial warfare, mustard gas is noted most for its insidiousness. While chemical damage begins several minutes after exposure, symptoms only manifest at the sensory level 2–24 hours later. Recuperation can take months, and after-effects linger for decades. But we know much less about what happens to mustard gas in the sea. Its dissolution is certainly slower, but the water also contains its toxic dispersal. Even as the metal canisters are slowly broken down by the sea, their contents develop an outer crust, and the chemicals become enveloped in a shell of their own making. Temperature, salinity, microbial properties in the sediment and disturbance are all factors that make the dangers of these sunken weapons almost impossible to accurately predict.

Research might be an exercise in cultural inductions, testing out hypotheses, indexical sleuthing – looking for clues, crumbs, a path into the deep

When we spoke to the researchers at the Swedish National Defense Institute, they confirmed what we had learned about the mustard gas, dumped en masse. Yes, these canisters are probably leaking. There is a chance that the lesions on the seals can be attributed to these forgotten military relics. It may be that the seals, as well as cod, sea birds, mussels and other marine life, have been most heavily burdened with the task of embodying the memory as these toxic pasts. As potential sentinel species, they convey any changes in the deep to ecologists trying to piece together what’s going on down there. But the curator from the Museum of Natural History who took the possibility of mustard gas burns most seriously also admits that CWA are probably the least of our environmental worries, when it comes to the Baltic Sea. This generally shallow body of water, embraced by nine northern countries and around 16 million human coastal dwellers, has been slowly suffocating from pollution such as fertilizer-driven eutrophication and overfishing for decades. Indeed, when CHEMSEA tried to test the contamination at the weapons dump sites, efforts were complicated by the fact that unaffected species to be used for comparison were hard to identify. Nothing much lives at the bottom of a choked sea, anyways.

Environmental toxicity in the Baltic cannot be traced to a single event, nor can its sources be easily compartmentalized. Mustard gas is leeching into the waters, but the nitrate run-off of large-scale agriculture with which the CWA mingle can be traced back to the same origin story of the rise of industrial chemistry.

What research methods would be able to isolate the right narrative, find the right cause, point the finger in the right direction? We realize this may hardly be the point

Back on Gotland, we cannot come to know the weapons, so we instead seek to understand the cultural, historical, affective and environmental infrastructures that condition them, preserve them and buoy them into an uncertain future. These weapons are concentrated nodes of pasts and futures that call for nothing less than a material-semiotic analytics, where humans and environments cannot be disentangled. As such, they resonate as methodological touchstones for the environmental humanities. On the beach, we encounter fossils of heliolite corals, crinoids, brachiopods and trilobites in a reminder of the way the past always leaks into the present; we turn a corner and find Viking runes (Figure 3) – other kinds of lives etched into stone – and realize that the lithic layers that archive this island’s past are always a natural-cultural entanglement. In our drive towards the eastern shore to try to imagine the legacy of the chemical weapons dumped in those waters, we stumble across a make-shift outdoor art gallery, where whimsical contemporary sculptures (Figure 4) are built from old bomb casings and other military relics, likely washed up on those shores.

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Figure 3.

Image of fossils/image of runes, side by side.

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Figure 4.

Sculptures made from military relics at Wanges on Gotland Island.

We (who live comfortably in Sweden and Australia) assumed that the war was half a century ago, but realize it is still here, just rewritten, recomposed. The history museum, like those runes that are scattered along the back roads, reminds us that Gotland has been a dense transfer point of militarization for centuries. We become attuned to the fact that the anthropogenic afterlives of war are not limited to these now corroding capsules. The pink-rimmed eyes of that seal remind us that the militarization of ‘nature’ might sometimes lie dormant beneath the waves for decades. Here on Gotland, we start to trace the palimpsest of military detritus that already stretches into the future to reconfigure how we read the war archives we encounter here. On the day we leave, we learn that due to increased geopolitical tensions between Russia and Western Europe, there are plans to remilitarize this island.

We are unable to find any evidence of the CWA we came to learn about – the local people we talk to have some vague inklings but can tell us little. The library has no archival information that we might access. We are told of a man who is apparently obsessed with the CWA dumping. We get an address, but it turns into a dead end. Again, it seems we are coming up empty-handed. But we realize the traces are actually all around us. We just have to know where to look and be willing to keep our eyes open for things we might not otherwise notice.

This is an experiment in research by proxy: a way of ‘fathoming’ what we cannot know – that is, diving down to where we can only dwell temporarily, to where we can only catch traces of stories in stolen glimpses. This strange kind of ‘remote sensing’ may be all we can ever hope for. Rather than a methodological failing, this may be a constraint we need to acknowledge and respect.

As with the seal lying in necropsy, we realize that all we can do is follow these strange leads. The meaning of this story of chemical weapons in the Gotland Deep cannot, no matter which way we approach it, offer itself as conclusive. And while we find little directly connected to the dumped chemical weapons, we understand that these agents are nonetheless being reactivated in other ways – in our imaginations, in this research.

Back in the lab, perhaps another seal is brought in. Still inconclusive. But whether or not the lesions are due to mustard gas leaking from corroded containers, we do know that the CWA are somewhere down there. We do know that the seal is damaged. We do know that Gotland once again hosts an active military presence. We do know that the past will continue to swim into the present whether we are certain of its providence or not, and that questions of environmental toxicity will also be questions of history, war, hydrogeology and economics, even if this entanglement proves impossible to pick apart.

In the context of the Anthropocene, where old stories of nature and culture can no longer be held apart, and where the past is already writing different kinds of futures, we also know we will need to look for new ways to tell these stories. While we may have set out to explore the connection of old mustard gas caches to unexplained injuries in dead seals, we realized that this story was more tangled than this simple cause-and-effect. As both scientists and humanities scholars, we find resonance across our different ways of grappling with the world that will not find comfort in certainty. Instead, we experiment, and learn to story the world together. We gather the crumbs we find and assemble them in the hope that they will help us engage better with the slow violences aswim in this sea. We develop agility, and a capacity for inventive response. We know the tide will soon come in again, sweeping the traces back out to sea, and reconfiguring them anew.