You know, these guys.
Are there any currently active minefields at sea?
How did they know, after WWII, that they had all been successfully removed?
Yes, there are, especially around the DMZ in the Koreas.
How do you know? Minesweepers go through and cut mooring lines so some ‘float’ to the top for evental EOD rendering-safe and disposal. Otherwise, you’re sending EOD divers into the water.
Sometimes, metallic/magnetic signatures can point you in the direction of one. But then again, you need to dispose of it.
How’d they know after WWII? No more sunken ships.
Tripler
There’s modern mines that lay in wait for years until ‘activated.’
Coming from you, that is particularly hilarious.
BOOM!
Shit, we missed one. :o
On the first page of images for WW2 sea mines, you get this picture:
http://chivethebrigade.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/ww2-sea-mines-500-14.jpg
You really have to give those guys back in World War II credit for being masters of camouflage.
They weren’t all successfully removed. A quick google search found that they’ve found some as recently as 2012, when two WWII sea mines were found in the Ems River estuary (I have no idea where that is…).
There are areas marked on nautical navigation maps that warn of known WWII unexploded ordnance. All sorts of things from WWII including sea mines, land mines, bombs, shells, and chemical weapons, are all still a hazard even today. The chemical weapons can be particularly nasty since the casings are so old that they are often rusting through and the dangerous chemicals can leak out and cause harm. A lot of that stuff was dumped into the ocean to dispose of it after WWII and sometimes gets pulled up by fishing nets.
It’s the Dutch-German border on the North Sea.
How to locate sea mines? Send in the dolphins!
The military uses trained marine mammals – mostly dolphins and California sea lions – for exactly this kind of work. They are fabulously adept at it – dolphins can find a dime buried in the mud.
This isn’t something out of Day of the Dolphin. The dolphins don’t disarm mines or retrieve them. They simply locate them and put some kind of a marker on them.
They certainly don’t go kamikaze and detonate them, or place magnetic mines on ships like in the movie. As a military dolphin trainer once explained to me and some others: Dolphins are waaaaaaaaaaay too expensive to be treated as expendable, by the time you buy or capture one, get it trained, and all the care and feeding and facilities it takes. If you need expendable critters, you would be much better to use plain old human redshirts.
Military Dolphins and Sea Lions: What Do They Do and Who Uses Them? Military-trained marine mammals, including dolphins, can detect underwater mines and intruders. Jane J. Lee, National Geographic, March 28, 2014.
Yes, for instance the Baltic Sea is full of them. According to the Swedish Coastguard, of the 165 000 mines that were deployed there during WW2 it’s estimated that around 40 000(:eek:) still remain.
I’m looking at a table (in German) listing incidents with naval mines after WWII:
http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/minen/minenverluste.htm
According to this, ships were damaged or destroyed for more than a decade after the end of WWII. The last recorded incident occurred in 1957 with 3 fatalities.
Also keep in mind that shipping tends to go in certain ‘pathways’ so if the mines are not within a certain distance they may not be discovered until a fisherman or private boater finds them.
Let me see if I can find a shipping lane chart online - I have a couple in the barn but no scanner large enough to scan them in unless I fold them all to hell.
Ha, perfect. This is a chart showing the main shipping lanes used in the Pacific in WW2 - color coordinated by nationality. You can be very certain that the mines will be centered on the areas around the entrances of harbors, generally laid in a pattern known to the people laying them so their shipping can thread through the pattern. Of course, intending that the enemy would try to go in and hit an area of the pattern. Minefields are a denial of access passive attack. The US and Australian forces removed our own minefields easily [of course, we had our own charts of their locations] but what had kept us busy was removing all the Japanese Imperial ones as frequently by the time we were rolling in to some small island base we were only clearing a path in to drop in troops, and after the combat the Japanese were dead or their charts were otherwise unavailable.
Many sea mines have been found every year, but probably the detonation systems had failed by 1957…
They had some idea of where mines were placed by the loss of ships to them, and by inspecting obvious places for mines to be placed.
Here’s a discription of the work to do around Australia in 1945
Many mines may be in water too deep,eg washed there or dumped there. Its remotely possible a mine will detach and float up and detonate when near/touching a ship somewhere someday. But the mechanisms probably failed in the time since 1957, many mines have been found at the shore or floating, with no ship losses.
You dare not assume this. It doesn’t matter how safe it ‘looks’, do not assume this. I know of several pieces from WWII and WWI that had fusing systems still armed/dangerous when stumbled on.
And floating mines that have beached themselves have simply not had the right trigger to detonate–either magnetic or hard metallic contact (it takes a whack). The damn things still contain explosives, and some knucklehead climbing onto one, using one of the horns as a handhold or footstep can easily detonate it.
Want to climb a mine? Find one sunk into the earth. Not one bobbin’ around in the water or washed up on a beach.
Tripler
Please kids, don’t try this at home.
I wish you’d marked that NSFW. Hope my agency’s censors understand.
Mine! Mine mine mine!
“I’ll disarm her, sir!”
“No, me, me! I volunteer!”
Naval mines were disposed of at sea?
:dubious:
No, not even then, as I remember a mate who had been in EOD rather forcibly telling the son of a friend. A mine that’s been buried can be exposed by wind, rain, and tide. And I’m sure you know the story of the Grand Slam Bomb that was mounted as a gate guardian at RAF Scampton and found to be live over a decade later. :eek::eek: All ordnance should be treated as live ordnance until known otherwise.
Surely you want a dyslexic judge to disbra her? 
Quite right: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/05/02/virginia-man-killed-in-civil-war-cannonball-blast/
I’ve been told my sense of humor can be quite disarming.
Not just mines, but artillery shells, small arms ammo, dispenser assemblies, bursters, mortar rounds, propellant of all sorts, you name it. Apocryphally, there are stories from the end of the War, where school buses were loaded with already produced munitions, which couldn’t be demilitarized without cost, nor shipped to a war that was no longer in progress. So, they just loaded up teh bus, drove it to a swampy spot in Southern New Jersey, and drove the bus in! There are not-so-dubious stories of similar munitions crates being simply dumped overboard for similar reasons. Yep, it happens.
Farmers tend to plow them up on old artillery ranges. Subdivisions have the same problem, especially after wildfires*.
Oh yeah I know that story! I also know the story from Delaware about the mustard round too. Everything is suspect until proven otherwise.
Tripler
- I responded to a couple of those subdivisions.
In Clive Cussler’s thriller Vixen 03, a military-surplus company sells what they believe to be live 16" armor-piercing battleship shells to a VFW post. The vets plink away at the shells from a distance for a Fourth of July celebration, hoping for a big bang, but nothing happens, so they assume the shells are duds, and display them outside their meeting hall. Turns out the shells had special fuses because they were carrying an extremely nasty biotoxin all along. Fortunately, they’re eventually tracked down, recovered by the government and safely disposed of.