 Good afternoon and welcome to the last press conference of EU 23, which is the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union. I'm Jillian D'Souza, EU's media and communications officer. And I will in a very short time introduce our speakers for today. I would just like to share that the press conference will proceed in that each person will make their presentation for a few minutes. And we will then conclude with a common question and answer round towards the end for all of our speakers. So this press conference is titled wars impact oceans, sands and people. Our participants, our speakers for today are Edmund Mazer from University Hospital Kiel Institute of Toxicology Germany, who is our virtual speaker and joining us online. Then we have Olivier Evra from the CNRSCE, LSE, which is Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory France, and then Florian Yin from the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters Delaware, US and Eustace Liebig University, Gießen, Germany. So we are ready to begin with Edmund as our first speaker. And once we have a slides ready, then over to you Edmund. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. And you can see my slides. Yeah. Okay. So my poster is named toxicological consequences of seetam to munition. And I'm happy to share my results with you. So just as a bullet point, we have a new group of pollutants that is emerging in the world's oceans. So we already have to do this microplastics, pesticides and pharmaceuticals. But now we have a new one. And this is seed dumped munition explosive chemicals as relics from the world wars. So the problem is that we have millions of tons of corroding munitions worldwide, deriving after the world war two and after World War One already. And they are not only of harm because they can explode, but they also are of harm with regard to environmental damage, because they are corroding and release the toxic chemicals into the marine environment. So this is a sketch showing that we have these munition items here as greenboards on the sea floor lying. And we already know that the toxic compounds, TNT and other explosives leaking out of these munition vessels. And they are to be found now in the sediment in the poor water in the waters surrounding these items. And already we found them in the biota living there in the near. So the question is, where are these munition items derived from? So this was actions during war, for example. So the allies, they performed line laying procedures to protect them from the Germans and the Germans in turn. They also performed line barriers in the Baltic Sea, for example. And it happens that today we have line barriers from every nation being located in the border of the Baltic Sea. And these line barriers are only sometimes some kilometers apart from each other. Other things are then sunk in ships which have been attacked and which sunk full of munition and full of fuels loaded. Or we have shot down airplanes or airplanes which dropped the bombs into the Baltic Sea. And for instance, when the planes come home, they just and they didn't reach their final destination and they were fully loaded. They prior to landing released all the bombs into the sea because it was too dangerous to land on the high airport. But the most of these compounds derived from discarding after the wars. So after the war, there were much of munition compounds left or munition items left and that were discarded in the Baltic and also in the North Sea. It was the easiest way to get rid of these harmful things. So currently, we have a worldwide problem because the munition is distributed all over the world. So around Australia, in the Pacific, West and East coast of the United States, but the North and sea and the Baltic Sea are particularly affected because of the two world wars. So in our approach, we just did the following. We performed a so-called bio warning touring with blue mussels. The left side, upper left side shows you the gold mega hidden near pre-report. And in this area, we have a major dumping site for munition items from the Second World War. And these balls represent mines that are in diameter one meter and each of these balls contains 200 to 300 kilogram of TNT. So we constructed a mooring. The mooring is shown on the right side. It's like an anchor with lifting bodies. And there we put mussels from fresh areas. So they were not burdened with any munitions. So they were from areas without dumping munitions. With the help of divers, we positioned these mussels near the mines, which are shown there. And after three months, we recollected the mussels done, put them into the lab, and then we performed an analysis on very sensitive machines. And we could then measure this TNT and all the metabolites of TNT and derivatives thereof. So this shows just the sketch we did. We performed several scenarios. So the first scenario is just to having this mooring in the near of a corroding mine. On the left side, you see the corroding mine. And then you see the mussel bags there. And after three months, we collected these mussels and we just did the toxicological risk assessment. So we found that from the point of view of human seafood consumer, these mussels can still be eaten. However, the mussels themselves, they show health effects, which we could show with a molecular biomarker that these mussels suffer from oxidative stress. The second scenario was performed in an area where we had three line chunks of TNT. So these are not any more covered with metal shells, but these are free. And the problem is that we have a much higher entry of TNT and this toxic and explosive stuff into the nearby mussels. And the toxicological risk assessment showed us that the consuming mussels from this area bears the carcinogenic risk for the human seafood consumer. However, we have another problem and this problem is from the marine ecology. So if I was a fish, I would not place my eggs there on the surface of the sea floor or in the free water. I instead would place my eggs then in clefts and in other holes. And the corroding mines are ID places just to put the eggs there and to raise the larvae. And we know that the larvae are very sensitive to even low concentrations of these munition compounds. They do not reproduce and they do not grow and they do not develop. And this brings me to the North Sea. We have in the North Sea more than 10,000 shipwrecks and 500 of them are loaded with munition both from the First World War or from the Second World War. Just some examples. We have very big cruisers, but we also have smaller fishing boats or submarines. So I'd like to focus attention on the John Mann on the lower left side. The John Mann was a fishing boat which was confiscated by the Nazis. And the Nazis armed this one with anti-aircraft guns and water bombs. Now we have the situation that in 1949 the John Mann was sunk by an aircraft attack. It is now corroding on the sea floor, which you see in the middle lower area. And we know that the TNT and all the metabolites thereof, which are carcinogenic toxics, leak out the munition items there. And we could find all these munition items then in shells, in fish, in sediment, in water. And what we are doing now is we are performing toxicological risk assessment insofar as their human seafood consumer is concerned. And when it comes to the marine environment, we already found in fish a higher incidence of tumors, of liver tumors, which unequivocally is the reason because of the exposure to this munition. So I come to the conclusion. So these explosives from dumped munitions or from shipwrecks, they are toxic and carcinogenic. And we have currently no acute risk for the human seafood consumer. But these explosives and danger already now, the marine ecology and the marine diversity. And in principle, they may also enter the marine food chain once the corrosion continues. And this is the problem. So another point is, as has been done until now, to get rid of these munition items, they were placed in places there, where they were in the sea floor. But we could show that this increases the problem with the distribution of these munition compounds in the marine biota. So in our eyes, the recovery of dumped munitions should begin immediately. And when it comes to the shipwrecks, the shipwrecks is of course another story because it's very difficult to remediate shipwrecks. But one could do a priority list and to monitor the ships and make just a list where we should start with the remediation. And this remediation regarding munitions and fuel cargo should be considered. So thank you for your attention. Thank you, Edmund. We will now move on to our next speaker Olivier. So just give us a minute for your slides to load and then you can begin. Thanks. Good afternoon. So I will show you how we try to answer this question to know whether the caesium 1.7 radioactive, an artificial radioactive substance contained in saran dust, which deposited across Europe last spring in 2022, whether it was emitted by a French nuclear test in Algeria. And to answer these questions, we worked with different research teams from France, Switzerland and Spain. So actually, there have been several significant dust episodes recently and including in February 2021 and in February 2022, February and March 2022, with significant deposition of dust across several countries in Western Europe. And actually in both 2021 and 2022, there is at least one association who collected one single dust sample and analyzed it and found this artificial radioactive substance caesium 1.7 into dust deposits. And so it made the headlines in several European media in these two years. And as this radioactive substance contained in saran dust was found, they attributed it to the French nuclear tests that were conducted in the Sahara before Algeria became independent in nearly six days. But actually, we thought that it would be beneficial to have more than one single sample to conclude this. And so what we did together with the Spanish colleague on Twitter, we launched a pod symmetry campaign to ask people collecting dust. And in 2022, actually, the deposits were quite dense. So it was quite fruitful, actually, as we could collect more than 100 samples across different regions of Western Europe, many from Spain and France, different locations, but also some samples from Belgium, the Luxembourg and Austria. And so now we are compiling a database that we want to make available open access resulting from this pod symmetry campaign. But of course, it takes some time to analyze these samples. And we want to answer this question by measuring various properties, including the color of tests, it's contained in different chemical elements and so on. So based on these multiple analysis, what we could show is that we have quite homogeneous or even very homogeneous samples in most of the regions, except in Austria. And we think it's because the Austrian samples were collected with a significant snow cover and that probably different dust from different origins were mixed, which was not the case, typically in Spain and France. We could show, indeed, that the color, the mineralogy of the dust samples were consistent with those soils and rocks you find in the region of the Algerian Sahara, where friends did conduct nuclear tests. It's consistent in that way. And we did find radioactive cesium 107 in all the dust samples that we obtained. But that said, can we conclude that this cesium is attributable to the French tests? Actually, we do think that very likely not. Why? Because so cesium was produced by all the nuclear atmospheric tests that were conducted around the world. And that if you look at the map on the left, you see the different location where nuclear atmospheric tests were conducted around the world along with the power of these tests. And you see that the major tests sites were operated by the USA and by the Soviet Union, including at latitudes where the Sahara is located and once it's emitted into the atmosphere, it will disperse following the general air circulation and then deposit with rainfall. So to answer the question, what we can do as well is to look at another artificial radioactive substance that's been emitted by the nuclear tests, which is plutonium. Because plutonium, depending on its signature, can tell you whether it comes from typically US tests or French tests because basically they use different technologies and recipes to construct their bombs. So typically the global fallout signature, which is in red on the graph on the right, which is largely dominated by the US and the Soviet Union tests, was the signature we found in all the selection of the samples we analyzed across Europe, whereas the French, the expected French signature, the French bomb signature, would be the blue stripes you see on the graph and none of the sample had a similar signature. So to answer this question, we could obtain, thanks to this participatory campaign, more than 100 samples, which give us a basis with a representative spatial extent to answer a question of large interest. And we could show that the signature of the radioactive fallout was quite valuable to identify without any ambiguity the source of this fallout. And actually it was useful to answer this question, but it's also useful to answer other research questions, including to make the difference between the radioactive fallout due to the global fallout associated with the nuclear atmospheric test, but also typically accidental fallout like the Chernobyl. So we can make the difference between Chernobyl and global fallout or discriminate the specific emissions produced by the nuclear accident in Fukushima and also because like France after the independence of Algeria, they moved for their other for the next nuclear test to French Polynesia in the Pacific Ocean and they conducted their test later, which is quite useful because they were associated fallout with a distinct signature to date like sediment and environmental archives in South America, where many land use, deforestation and other processes have been taken place during the same period, which helps us to reconstruct the impacts on those changes on environmental processes. And this would be the end. Thank you. Now we will hear from our final speaker, Florian, in a few minutes. All right. I'm coming up to you as a senior scientist from the Alliance to Feed Thirst and Disasters. If you want to get into contact after the call, you can connect with us by just following the link you can see here or writing the email. So at all that we are looking at what we can do to people in extreme situations and one of those extreme situations is nuclear war, which has come back to all of our minds due to the invasion of Ukraine. However, when we discussing nuclear war, we often talk about the radiation and the explosions. However, it is likely that the most dire effect from a nuclear war is the nuclear winter that could happen after that. In a nuclear winter, the global temperature could drop up to 10 degrees. And also the precipitation would change, global ocean currents would change. All this in combination would lead to would likely lead to a massive shortfall in food production. There is a study by XEADL where they simulate this and they came up with up to 90% loss of food production. At all that we want to see what could be done instead. So what kind of resilient food solutions those food solutions that could also work in such scenario could be used to mitigate the losses brought into by nuclear war. One of those foods is seaweed. Mudboarding why seaweed? Seaweed can grow just extremely fast. So up to 30% per day. It also can be grown in a low-tech environment. So what you can see pictures here are actual seaweed farming today, which can be done quite low-tech. And also we know that seaweed can be grown today. We can use it for food production in the future because we're using it for food production now. What we did was we used nuclear winter data and modeled the seaweed growth globally after nuclear war and also how quickly we could scale up the global production. The first key result I want to share with you is this global map which shows where seaweed can still be grown in a nuclear winter. The dark green is the very suitable areas, light green is somewhat suitable and blues unsuitable. As you can see there are still considerably large areas after nuclear war where we can still grow seaweed. Also many of those areas are located in places where already growing seaweed today, like for example Indonesia. The second key result I want to share with you is how the growth of seaweed develops over time in nuclear winter. The figure you see here shows the median daily growth rate for the seaweed over the first 10 years after the nuclear war. The color indicates the severity of the war, so the darker the color, the more severe the nuclear war was. As you can see you have the peak of the growth rate in the first year, in the first few years and also for the more severe nuclear winters, which might seem counterintuitive, but the explanation is actually quite straightforward. The seaweed, the nuclear winter disrupts global ocean currents. Those disrupted global ocean currents lead to the upwelling of nutrients in the oceans and the more the severe the nuclear war was, the more the larger the upwelling becomes. For the seaweed, the limiting factor for growth is often not the amount of temperature or light available with the nutrients, and so if you have a nuclear winter where more nutrients are brought to the surface, you also have more seaweed growth. The third key result I want to share with you is how quickly the seaweed can be scaled up. We used as a comparison case the production of airplanes by the U.S. in the Second World War and our model shows that we could produce after only seven months an equivalent of 70% of the global human food demand in seaweed. It does not mean that we want to feed everyone 70% seaweed, but the seaweed can also be used as feed for animals and also for biofuel production, which will also be important in the nuclear winter. All this can be done in an area roughly the size of Lithuania, so it isn't actually that large in the global comparison. The implications to really manage to get this going, we would need to establish infrastructure beforehand. Like for example, at places where we're already producing seaweed, we could also have their hatcheries where we provide additional species that could work in nuclear winter. It would also be good if we could look at more species because this study was done with only one kind of seaweed. The next thing is seaweed often contains iodine, and the amount of iodine is actually what limits how many seaweed people can eat. If we would have seaweed species or techniques that remove the iodine from the seaweed, we could also eat more seaweed. Finally, seaweed is just a good idea in general because it could improve food security now. For example, the FAO regularly calls for more seaweed use to improve food security. There has also been research going on how we could use seaweed as a way to combat climate change because we can sequester carbon from the atmosphere with it. Then the combination with the added civilizational resilience in nuclear winter seaweed is a really good deal. To conclude, we have shown that there is a high potential for seaweed to improve the food security in nuclear winter. There are also large areas available where you can cross the seaweed, and this in combination shows that seaweed could help avoid global famine in a nuclear war. Thank you for your time. If you want to connect, you can do so by the link or by just writing an email. Thank you. Thank you to all of our speakers for today. We now move to the next and the final part of our press conference, which is the question and answer round. I open the floor to questions from journalists in the room and those joining us online. If you have questions for our virtual speaker as well, we have Edmund ready to answer. Thank you. Yeah, we have a question. Hello, I'm Javier Orbus, an animal freelance journalist. I have a question for Olivier. Your conclusion is that the decision that is present in the Sahara is not coming from the French nuclear test more from the global fallout, right? So that means that anywhere in the world, we're getting the same amount of fallout, or it gets worse in the sand episodes. And then is this level of radiation? So the first is about the amount. If it gets worse after we have episodes of Sahara and dust. And the second is, is this level of radiation bad for the health or for the environment? Thank you. Okay. So you will find cesium in almost any soil in the world because there has been fallouts everywhere. Depending on the level, actually, the cesium, it will bind to the finest mineral particles, typically clay. And so what happens with the Saharan dust episode is that you will have a selection of those finest particles that will travel the farthest from the source. So typically with the sample set we analyzed, we saw that the dust that deposits in France is finer and richer in cesium than the dust deposited in Spain. And given the, so you have an enrichment, but still it remains quite low. And I would say unharmful. So if you go to the Sahara and sample the dust directly from the desert, is it even low concentration? Well, I guess it depends on the place where you collect the dust. So we tried to find different ways of getting back to the source. And actually there are lots of scientists doing this for paleoclimateology studies. And so we have different types of rocks and so different signatures. And in terms of cesium, actually we have information about the latitudinal distribution, but we don't have detailed maps. So maybe there are zones with higher concentrations. We don't know. This remains to be investigated. Thank you. Maybe we have another question coming in just a minute. Hi, I'm Teresa from the EGU Prescoms team. And I have a question for Florian. Might be a bit of a silly question. But how do you measure the severity of the nuclear winter? I saw that you indicated it with a TG in your graph. So what does that TG mean? And how do you model the severity? Okay, yeah, sorry, I didn't explain that. So the TG is for pterograms. And this refers to the amount of carbon that was emitted to the atmosphere. Because the nuclear war is caused by the burning of the cities. And they go up in flames. And this is just a measure of how much black carbon emits to the atmosphere. Okay, thank you very much. Did we have any other questions? We don't seem to have any questions from anyone online either. So if we are good, okay, then we can conclude this press conference. So thank you once again to our speakers for joining us today. Virtual speaker as well as those in the room. If anyone has any questions to ask them or if you'd like to request an interview, then you can definitely reach out to me. And we would put you in touch with the speakers. So thank you again for joining us today. This was the last press conference of EU23. And I wish you all a very successful conclusion to the conference week. Thank you.