Name: 黑色眼淚（Forgotten wrecks are a time bomb | DW Documentary）
Uploaded: 2021-11-01T04:08:33.000Z
Duration: 42 min 26 s
Description: 【看影片學英語】數萬部 YouTube 影片，搭配英漢字典即點即查，輕鬆掌握單字發音與用法，長久累積看電影不必再看字幕。

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Danger is lurking off our coasts -- and hardly anyone suspects that there's a

problem. Weapons of war that have been deteriorating for decades.

This threat on the ocean floor is known only to a few experts.

Here at the Polish port of Gdynia, a team of experts is

getting their research vessel ready for an expedition.

The crew includes hydrographers, biologists, and divers from the Marine

Institute in the nearby port of Gdańsk. They've been working together for years.

They're headed for a site located in the Bay of Gdańsk, about half-an-hour's

sailing time away. In 1999, experts made an alarming discovery there.

The team's leader is Benedykt Hac, a former Polish navy officer. His repeated

warnings about these underwater wrecks have made him unpopular with the authorities.

-Some of them don't like what we're doing here. But it's not our job to please

them, or to make things easy for them. This is like a mission for us.

Benedykt Hac has been researching this part of the bay for years.

The site is located just two kilometers off the coast.

The pristine beaches along the Bay of Gdańsk are known as the “Polish Riviera"

-- and they're an important part of the country's tourism industry. More than

two-million Europeans spend their summer holidays here every year.

-This is a great place to take a vacation. Just marvellous.

The beaches are beautiful, and the people are friendly.

Some think it's going to be like this forever -- but sadly, that's not the case.

There's a problem here that only a few people know about, and it's very dangerous.

The ship picks up speed to do a sonar scan of the seabed.

Gradually the sonar images reveal a relic from the past that poses a major threat

to the tourist beaches: the wreck of the German hospital ship “Stuttgart.” The

In the autumn of 1943, the ship was anchored at Gdynia — renamed "Gotenhafen"

by the occupying Germans. The vessel was to take

on wounded soldiers from the Eastern Front.

On the morning of October 9th, 378 bombers of the U-S

8th Army Air Force took off from their bases in Britain.

Their mission was to destroy the strategically vital ports and dockyards

along occupied Poland's Baltic coast. They reached the target area in about 4 hours.

The “Stuttgart” took a number of direct hits. Fire broke out on the ship, and

flames lit up the entire harbor area. The crippled vessel was later towed out into

the bay and sunk, so that it wouldn't block the port area.

Today, the "Stuttgart" is just a footnote in history books.

The site of the wreck was soon forgotten.

But in 1999, Benedykt Hac came across the ship's wreckage while he was

mapping the floor of the bay for the Gdańsk Marine Institute.

He's returned to the site often since then. He and his

researchers continue to monitor the condition of the wreck.

Today, divers are braving the ice-cold water to have a look.

The “Stuttgart” lies just 20 meters below the surface.

It's overgrown with seaweed and shellfish.

There's not much left of the vessel, but the wreckage is spread out over an area

that would cover two football fields. In the 1950s, parts of

the ship were blown up in an operation to salvage scrap steel.

At first glance, the wreck and the area around it don't seem to pose a threat.

The divers will use special equipment to take samples from the seabed.

The first sample that's brought up shows why Benedykt Hac is so concerned.

It contains thick globs of oil. The researchers

call them the “Black Tears of the Sea."

Over the years, Hac and his team have collected over 1,000 seabed samples from

this site. But this is the most dangerous material that they've found so far.

It's a thick, foul-smelling mass that contains a lot more oil than sand.

-I've never seen anything like it here before!

The researchers will take the mud back to their laboratory for closer inspection.

-We're on the brink of an ecological catastrophe here, and I don't think

we can do anything more to prevent it. This site is completely

contaminated. All forms of life have been eradicated.

Benedykt Hac intends to take another 200 seabed samples so that he can

assess the extent of the pollution in the Bay of Gdańsk.

Is the “Stuttgart” just a tragic one-off case? What about all the other sunken

Do they pose a threat to the environment as well?

Less than 20 kilometers away, we find the Westerplatte peninsula on the Bay of

Gdańsk. This is where the first shots of World War II

in Europe were fired -- on September 1, 1939.

At 4:45 AM, the German battleship “Schleswig Holstein”

The war would drag on until 1945 -- on land, and at sea. The Allies and the Axis

Powers had huge navies that battled for supremacy.

Allied merchant shipping was often targeted...

...as Germany's navy and air force tried to cut supply lines.

German U-Boats, known as the “Grey Wolves,” took a huge toll on allied shipping.

In June 1942, they destroyed an average of four vessels a day.

But what was the total number of ships that were sunk during the war? And how

many of them pose an environmental threat today, like the the "Stuttgart" does?

To find out more, we travel to Tampa, on Florida's Gulf Coast.

Every year, U-S Coast Guard officials, scientists, and salvage experts take part

in the “Clean Gulf" conference, to exchange ideas on how to combat oil spills at sea.

Among those at this year's session is American biologist and environmental

analyst Dr. Dagmar Schmidt Etkin. In 2004, Etkin began a study on the number

of potentially dangerous wrecks in the world's oceans.

-I collected data on different wrecks in different places, including a number of

German databases -- which I translated from German into English. And some of

those were based on, you know, which U-boat had sunk which vessels.

For two months, Etkin searched through archives and gathered data from sources

around the world. She also examined sonar images of shipwrecks. Etkin's study

included only vessels that had combustion engines, and a weight

of more than 400 gross register tons -- or 150 tons for tankers.

-So I found 8,500-and-something wrecks worldwide -- and about three-quarters of

those were World War II-related. It was a surprise, you know.

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