A few days ago, the British government suddenly announced that in order to strengthen the ties between the British Isles and Northern Ireland, a feasibility study will be carried out to see if it is possible to build a bridge or an undersea tunnel to connect Scotland and Northern Ireland by land.
Many people are skeptical about whether the government is serious, because the closest places in Scotland and Ireland are also nearly 20 kilometers apart. Whether it is to build a bridge or an undersea tunnel, it will be a costly and time-consuming project. It is hard to imagine that the British government has the will and Ability to do this.
In fact, the idea of connecting Scotland and Ireland by land is not new. It is said that there are plans handed down from the end of the 19th century. At that time, it was planned to build an undersea railway tunnel between the two islands. Over the next 100 years or so, this ambitious idea has been revisited from time to time.
With the advancement of construction technology, this idea seems to be technically possible, but there is an insurmountable gap between Scotland and Ireland, a real trench with a depth of up to 300 meters, which happens to be the closest to the two islands. The place. Even worse, the bottom of this trench is full of ammunition.
This place, called Beaufort's Dyke, has long been used by the British military to discard obsolete ammunition. From the beginning of the 20th century until the 1970s, it is estimated that a total of 1 million tons of obsolete ammunition were thrown in this trench of about 50 kilometers.
Many ammunition were discarded after World War II, including bombs, rockets, and even chemical weapons and low-dose nuclear waste sealed in steel tanks. The British military chose to discard obsolete ammunition here. The reason may be that there is a military port nearby and the operation is more convenient.
Discarding obsolete ammunition into the sea is not the original creation of the British military. It is unbelievable that until the 1970s, disposing of obsolete ammunition in this way was still regarded as a safe and economical method and was widely adopted by the military of various countries. The signing of the Oslo Convention in 1972 finally banned this behavior. In recent decades, the environmental and safety issues that may be caused by submarine munitions have gradually received attention.
Although these munitions generally fall directly on the bottom of the sea, they sometimes drift with the ocean currents, especially after being disturbed. In 1995, during the laying of the submarine natural gas pipeline between Scotland and Northern Ireland, there were incidents of grenades and bombs being washed up on nearby beaches. Before that, there have been low-intensity earthquakes here, which are thought to be related to the explosion of submarine munitions. A more common hazard is that after many years of corrosion of ammunition that has sunk on the seabed, harmful substances inside are gradually released, polluting the sea, and endangering marine life and human health.
How to deal with the obsolete ammunition that was discarded on the seabed in the past has now developed into a research direction in marine environmental science. In Europe, there is a database of submarine abandoned ammunition funded by the European Commission. The project's website lists the locations of submarine abandoned ammunition currently known in Europe. Judging from the map, from the North Sea to the English Channel to the Bay of Biscay, the discarding points are dotted, like time bombs.
Currently, all countries can do is monitoring, but there is no good way to eliminate potential harm. Avoiding deliberate disturbance seems to be the only way, so it is not wise to pile bridges or dig tunnels in the Beauforts Trench.
We may be grateful that these ammunition have been discarded instead of being used on the battlefield. But now it seems that these discarded ammunition may one day poison the people of the earth to death. For the British government, instead of dreaming of building a bridge and digging a tunnel across the sea, it is better to invest resources in solving the problem of submarine bombs, which will benefit future generations more.
