When searching for treasure, there’s no knowing what you might find. This was the case for Swedish divers who stumbled across something very strange in the Baltic Sea in 2011.
While using sonar to scan the seabed, they saw a strange shape.
The scans were blurry (some experts have said the sonar was misaligned, messing with the image) so it was hard to make out what this unidentified object might be: but it was circular and around 60 metres in diameter (around the size of a Ferris wheel).
- Scientists discover ancient deep-sea 'superhighway' that spans entire globe
- “I'm shaking...” Watch moment deep-sea researchers see something very rare - and surprising - deep in the ocean
What was it? No-one knew. Perhaps because of this, media speculation went wild. People suggested that it might be a meteorite or a UFO that had crashed in the ocean and was now sitting 90 metres deep on the seabed. Some even threw around the idea that the mythical lost city of Atlantis had finally been found.
“We need to know what we’ve found,” said Peter Lindberg, one of the treasure hunters on the Ocean X team who found the anomaly, in a press release at the time. “Media has been speculating about everything from UFO’s to Russian spaceships. What we know at this point is its size and shape and we also know, based upon the sonar image, that there is a ridged tail going from or to the cylinder-shaped anomaly of about 3,800 feet throughout the bottom of the sea.”
The Ocean X team had been looking for hidden treasures but this probably isn’t what they’d had in mind!
Things got weirder when the divers suggested that something in the region of the object – dubbed the Baltic Sea Anomaly – was causing technology to malfunction. When they were above the anomaly, they said their electrical equipment didn’t work.
But, before you start to get excited that we’ve finally discovered proof of interstellar lifeforms, hold your horses. There’s probably a more logical explanation.
According to Live Science, Volker Brüchert, an associate professor of geology at Stockholm University (and not on the Ocean X team), “most of the samples they have brought up from the sea bottom are granites and gneisses and sandstones."
The sunken treasure brought up from the region is also said to have included a piece of basalt, which is created when lava cools and solidifies.
The basin of the Baltic Sea was carved out by glaciers during the last ice age and these rocks may be souvenirs.
“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. “Possibly these rocks were transported there by glaciers.”
Although the crashed spaceship theory has been debunked by experts, many people have remained intrigued by the Baltic Sea Anomaly over the years – after all, a spaceship is more exciting than a glacial deposit.
This isn’t the only time strange geological formations have appeared to be something else: marine researchers found what looks like a replica of the Wizard of Oz’s yellow brick road 1,000 metres deep in the Pacific Ocean. Although it looks like something from the film set, the odd geological formation was actually created by ancient volcanic activity.
