II. The wreckage of a ship named V-1302 John Mahn, which sank with its poison-laden cargo during World War II, has been lying on the Belgian coast of the North Sea ever since. Originally, it was a German fishing boat, but was later redeployed as a patrol boat during WWII. Meanwhile, she was attacked and sunk by the British Royal Air Force in 1942.
In fact, the V-1302 is just one of the ships sunk during the First World War and the Second World War. All of these debris are thought to collectively contain around 20.4 million tons of petroleum products, suggesting that they are full of pollutants, albeit frightening.
The scientists took sediment samples from V-1302 and the seafloor in its immediate vicinity to determine how these pollutants were affecting the environment. Analyzes revealed that the shipwreck continues to leak various toxic pollutants into the environment, including heavy metals such as nickel and copper, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (chemicals found in coal, crude oil and gasoline), arsenic and explosive compounds.
Microbial analyzes revealed that the leaking shipwreck not only changed pollutants in its immediate vicinity, but also changed the microbiome of the seabed. This is because there are some peculiar microbes (Rhodobacteraceae, Rhodobacteraceae and Chromatiaceae) that love polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and therefore they are found in higher concentrations among the most polluted areas.
Sulfate-reducing bacteria such as Desulfobulbia, another microbe group, live in the shipwreck and contribute to corrosion.
“Wrecks can function as artificial reefs and have tremendous historical telling value,” the scientists said. But in the meantime, we must not forget that they can be dangerous, man-made objects that are unintentionally introduced into the natural environment,” he says. Today, precisely for this reason, discovered shipwrecks are now removed from the sea.
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