Examining U-864: Toxic Mercury Time Bomb Under Norway’s Seabed скачать в хорошем качестве

Examining U-864: Toxic Mercury Time Bomb Under Norway’s Seabed

U-864 is a toxic mercury time bomb under Norway’s seabed—an underwater kill that left a shattered WWII submarine packed with thousands of steel flasks. In 1945, HMS Venturer solved the impossible using passive hydrophones: bearing drift, depth estimates, and a staggered four-torpedo shot that formed a “3D net” in the dark. The blast broke the Type IXD2 into bow and stern, sealing 73 lives and a dense liquid-metal cargo into the mud. When U-864 was located decades later, the mission became forensic and non-disturbance: ROV survey, high-frequency sonar mapping, and careful documentation inside a restricted exclusion zone. The crisis is physics, not just history. U-864 rests on unstable seabed geometry, where a slope failure could bury the wreck beyond reach—while corrosion quietly weakens the keel flasks and mercury leakage contaminates surrounding sediment. In 2016, engineers executed a precision counter-fill: fall-pipe rock dumping with monitoring sensors to sculpt a massive underwater buttress that stabilizes the landslide trigger without moving the wreck. Now the debate is brutal—continued monitoring and sediment coring, partial retrieval under extreme controls, or full capping (“sarcophagus”) that could crush fragile compartments and worsen a release. U-864 remains a locked, monitored hazard where restraint can be the safest engineering choice. Subscribe for more shipwreck engineering & maritime history documentaries. DISCLAIMER: This video is for educational and historical documentation. Some images are AI-generated. All materials follow YouTube Fair Use policies.