The Baltic Sea anomaly is a feature that may be seen on an unclear sonar image captured in June 2011 while treasure hunting in the middle of the Gulf of Bothnia on the seabed of the northern Baltic Sea by Dennis Åberg and Peter Lindberg and their Swedish OceanX dive crew. The crew said that an object with peculiar characteristics and a presumably non-natural origin was seen in their sonar picture. This led to rumors in tabloid tabloids that the item was a submerged UFO.
Experts and scientists agree that the photograph most likely depicts a naturally occurring geological feature.
History
OceanX, a Swedish company, bills itself as a salvage and treasure seeker. The crew claims that in the summer of 2011, while looking for an ancient shipwreck in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland, they came back with a “blurry but interesting” sonar picture.
They assert that the photograph depicts a round object with a diameter of 60 meters (200 feet) and characteristics that may be man-made. The next year, the team went back to the location to get more thorough sonar images. In June 2012, the UK tabloid daily the Daily Mail published an article that sparked a wave of highly bizarre hypotheses.
Associate professor of geology at Stockholm University Volker Brüchert received samples of stone that OceanX had retrieved from the site. According to Brüchert’s study, the majority of the samples are sandstones, granites, and gneisses.
A loose fragment of basaltic (volcanic) rock, common to many at the location, was among the samples; it is rare to find it on the bottom. “Both the feature and the rock samples are likely to have formed in connection with glacial and postglacial processes, given the significant influence of glacial thawing processes throughout the entire northern Baltic region.” In addition, According to Brüchert, it’s possible that glaciers carried these rocks there.
According to Swedish geologists Fredrik Klingberg and Martin Jakobsson, the minerals discovered, such as limonite and goethite, might in fact have been generated by nature herself. The chemical makeup of the samples given mirrors that of nodules, which are frequently found in sea bottoms.
Response
Several people have expressed disapproval of OceanX’s lone sonar picture. According to Hanumant Singh of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, it is “virtually useless for identifying an undersea formation” due to multiple aberrations, which makes it untrustworthy.
Singh claims that the mismatches resulted from a cheap, faulty sonar device that was incorrectly connected and calibrated. According to an MSNBC story, tabloid tabloids likely drew graphic drawings of the mythical starship Millennium Falcon over the sonar image, which is why some have interpreted it as a flying saucer.
According to scientist Charles Paull of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, the faint sonar image was probably taken of a school of fish, a rock outcrop, or perhaps dirt deposited by a fishing trawler, as he told Popular Mechanics. The story was described by Paull as “interesting and entertaining, but much ado about nothing.”
Göran Ekberg, a marine archaeologist at the Maritime Museum in Stockholm, responded to a photo that the Swedish tabloid Expressen said was shot by OceanX during a dive to gather rock samples, saying: “A natural, geological formation can’t be ruled out.” I agree that the finding is strange because it is entirely circular. However, nature has created more bizarre things than that.”
After looking at the picture, Martin Jakobsson, a professor of marine geology and geophysics at Stockholm University, said, “I think it’s sandstone. To be clear, though, I’ve only seen the pictures in the media and I need additional information before I can formally comment.” According to some experts, the picture may depict a moraine or pillow basalt, or it might depict a collection of boulders left behind by ice period glaciers.
As the Fennoscandian shield is a thick craton with no active volcanism after the Proterozoic, volcanic-based explanations like a hydrothermal vent are not plausible, according to Finnish planetary geomorphologist Jarmo Korteniemi.
Regional bathymetry explains the “runway” formation under the anomaly as part of a larger group of similar NNW-SSE oriented mounds that occur on the bottom of the Bothnian Sea. According to Korteniemi, the “runway” is probably a drumlin—a naturally occurring rock formation—that was created by glaciers.
The Mars Space Flight Facility’s Jonathan Hill questioned the intentions behind OceanX’s announcements, which included plans to bring affluent guests to the facility by submersible. He was cited in 2012: “Whenever people make extraordinary claims, it’s always a good idea to consider for a moment whether they are personally benefiting from the claim or if it’s a truly objective observation.”
Additionally, he added that it would have been easy to cut off a piece and have it analyzed geologically, and that Peter Lindberg would not have profited from test findings indicating that it was just rock.
In a 2019 interview, Lindberg hinted that they would be involved in a television production that might lead to a new trip.
