Come with us as we dive into a belter of an ocean mystery: a giant, unidentified object spotted by ocean explorers at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. In one sonar image (albeit it rather blurry) it looks like the Millennium Falcon from above. Perhaps most curiously of all, the team that discovered it in 2011 thought it looked as if it were sitting at the end of a 300-meter (985-foot) flattened runway of seabed, perhaps caused by a crash landing.
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They questioned asteroids, volcanic material, U-boat bases from the Cold War, and – of course – an unidentified flying object (UFO, which – by the way – everyone’s now calling Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs). Could it be that at last we had proof that extraterrestrials have been zooming around our skies, only for one unfortunate spacecraft to end up as the world’s fanciest Aquarium Décor in the Baltic Sea? Oh, if only.
The Baltic Sea Anomaly: What happened?
The Baltic Sea Anomaly was first uncovered by Ocean X Team, a “world-leading deep-sea exploration company dedicated to uncovering lost treasures, historical shipwrecks, and underwater anomalies,” as stated on their website. In 2011, they set out on an expedition and captured a strange sonar image that depicted some kind of structure on the seafloor at a depth of around 91 meters (300 feet).
When they went back to see what on Earth it could be, they encountered peculiar interferences, which they claimed meant everything electric, including their satellite phone, stopped working when they were above the object. Once they put around 200 meters (656 feet) between themselves and the mystery structure, it all started working again.
In a 2014 Earth We Are One article shared to the fact-checking website Snopes, Ocean X Team founder and CEO Dennis Åsberg is quoted as saying: “I am one hundred percent convinced and confident that we have found something that is very, very, very unique.”
“Is it a meteorite or an asteroid? Or a volcano? Or a base from say, a U-boat from the Cold War which has manufactured and placed there? Or if it is a UFO? Well, honestly, it has to be something.”
What is the Baltic Sea Anomaly?
The story, naturally, attracted a lot of media attention, capturing the imaginations of people across the globe who can’t help but be hooked by a deep-sea mystery (let’s be honest, that’s basically all of us). However, science did as science does and found a rather more earthly explanation for the strange things Ocean X Team spotted on their sonar image.
Samples taken from the site and provided to associate professor of geology Volker Brüchert at Stockholm University revealed that they were granites, gneisses, and sandstones, rock types you’d expect in a glacial basin like the Baltic Sea. The strangest finding was a single piece of basaltic rock (basically hardened lava), but how it got there probably isn’t that strange at all.
“Because the whole northern Baltic region is so heavily influenced by glacial thawing processes, both the feature and the rock samples are likely to have formed in connection with glacial and postglacial processes,” Brüchert told Live Science in 2012. “Possibly these rocks were transported there by glaciers.”
So, not so much aliens as ancient glacial deposits, and perhaps a lesson that the kind of technology being used to scan the seafloor has a big impact on how you interpret the images (there are some absurdly detailed ways of looking at what’s on the seabed available today). In more optimistic news, the fanfare around the Baltic Sea Anomaly led to a new project for the Ocean X Team: The Panama Project in which they’ll be working alongside the Guna Yala Indigenous people to explore a historic shipwreck and search for others within their sacred waters.
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They’re also going in search of lost cognac, champagne, and three missing Fabergé eggs elsewhere in the world, truly a marine adventure to suit any taste. BRB, fetching some popcorn.
Source Link: The Baltic Sea Anomaly: What Was The Mysterious "Object" Seen 90-Meters Underwater?
