Abstract
Dumped chemical weapons (CW) pose an actual environmental and security hazard in the Baltic Sea Region. Their actual position is unknown, and pollution originating from corroded munitions is only roughly estimated. One of possible low-cost solution is the creation of monitoring network, providing info about exact location and environmental threat posed by sea dumped CW.
MODUM project aimed at the establishment of the monitoring network observing Chemical Weapons dumpsites in the Baltic Sea, using autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV’s) and remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROV’s), and utilizing existing research vessels of partner institutions as launching platforms. Project consisted of the test phase, which helped choosing best available solutions for the difficult Baltic Sea environment, Survey phase, which located actual objects of concern, and monitoring phase, which concentrated on the collection of environmental data close to the objects of concern. The result of the project is a set of methods and procedures that are applicable for the dumpsites monitoring, ranging from sea bottom survey, object identification to actual environmental parameters collection, biota exposure and portable chemical warfare agents (CWA) analysis. It uses such data for the calculation of environmental risk assessment in the dumpsites.
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Bełdowski, J., Long, T., Söderström, M. (2018). Introduction. In: Bełdowski, J., Been, R., Turmus, E. (eds) Towards the Monitoring of Dumped Munitions Threat (MODUM). NATO Science for Peace and Security Series C: Environmental Security. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1153-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1153-9_1
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