Lecture by Prof. Dr. Henning von Nordheim OZEANEUM | Conference Center 27 November 2024 | 7 pm | Admission free Donations are requested.
Before, during and after the two world wars, large quantities of munitions and ordnance ended up in the German North Sea and Baltic Sea. An estimated 1.6 million tons of conventional munitions, such as grenades, explosive and incendiary bombs, mines and torpedoes as well as up to 300,000 tons of chemical warfare agents such as mustard gas and tabun lie at the bottom of the two seas.
In recent decades, the dangers this poses to the marine environment and animals, fishing, shipping and tourism have been pointed out time and again. To date, however, there has been no environmentally sound and satisfactory removal of the explosive ordnance. The official and political assessment was that, due to the unclear assumption of costs, clearance could only be carried out in situations of immediate need. The steel munitions corrode in salt water and release carcinogenic and mutagenic TNT, highly flammable phosphorus and heavy metals such as mercury. At the same time, the discovery of munitions repeatedly delays and increases the cost of offshore projects such as wind farms and pipelines.
The common practice of detonating such munitions leads to considerable environmental pollution - including human food sources - due to the resulting chemical conversion products. Protected habitats are damaged and marine life such as porpoises are sometimes fatally affected.
Prof. Dr. Henning von Nordheim will illustrate this current pollution situation in German marine waters in his lecture. He will focus in particular on the changing awareness of the problem among politicians, authorities and the military and on the development of promising clearance methods. He provides an outlook on how successful cooperation between politics, authorities, science, industry and civil society can be achieved.
Prof. Dr. Henning von Nordheim was born in Detmold/Lippe in 1954 and has lived on the island of Rügen since 1992. He studied marine biology and anthropology at the University of Göttingen. In 1987, he completed his doctorate on a marine ecology and evolutionary biology topic at the Universities of Osnabrück and Auckland/New Zealand. After three years of teaching at the University of Braunschweig, he was appointed in 1992 by the then Minister of the Environment, Prof. Klaus Töpfer, to promote the development of marine nature conservation on the federal level on the Island of Rügen at the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) with the help of the Marine Nature Conservation Department. Since 1992, he has represented the Federal Republic of Germany in various national, European and global committees related to German and global marine nature conservation, until January 2020 as Head of the Marine Nature Conservation Department at BfN. Since 2011, he has held the only German honorary professorship for marine nature conservation at the University of Rostock. Henning von Nordheim has been advising German politicians for decades and is involved in various marine conservation organizations. He is Chairman of the Advisory Board of the German Oceanographic Museum and a member of the Board of Trustees of the German Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU) (especially for marine conservation issues such as munitions in the sea). He represents the NABU federal association in the federal-state committee "Munitions in the Sea". Prof. Henning von Nordheim is also the author of numerous publications.
Further information:www.munition-im-meer.de
