Preliminary statistics show that there are more than 1000 wrecks alone in the Baltic Sea area, which might still have large amounts of oil (as cargo or fuel oil) onboard that will cause significant pollution events in the case of an oil leakage, according to a new report.
Most of these wrecks are WWII wrecks, probably heavily corroded and hence have a high probability of oil leakage into the environment.
Numerous warships that sank in the Baltic Sea were carrying hundreds of tons of bunker oil and were heavily armed.
These shipwrecks are likely still filled with oil and other hazardous substances, in addition to containing naval mines, depth charges, and other munitions.
Besides these naval vessels, numerous merchant vessels sank both due to military conflict and for other reasons, e.g., bad weather and load shift.
Based on studies carried out on sunken ships and historical wrecks in the Baltic Sea area, there are thousands of old ships lying on the seabed.
A large proportion of those ships are of archaeological interest and do not pose a hazard to the marine environment. However, the large amount of modern wrecked ships that used oil for propulsion and energy production poses an environmental hazard to the marine environment.
The intergovernmental organisation (IGO) and a regional sea convention in the Baltic Sea area, Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission, also known as the Helsinki Commission (HELCOM), said in its 2025 publication “HELCOM Thematic assessment on hazardous submerged objects in the Baltic Sea (volume 2) potentially polluting shipwrecks in the Baltic Sea. HELCOM (2025),” that Estonia, Finland, and Sweden have all collected a great deal of information on wrecked ships in their waters, together with some sort of prioritization of which wrecks constitute the largest risk to the environment.
The report provides a status update on the HELCOM contracting parties’ awareness and work with potentially polluting shipwrecks and exemplifies activities that were performed on wrecks.
The accessibility and accuracy of the wreck information vary among HELCOM contracting parties. To remind, HELCOM has ten Contracting Parties, namely Denmark, Estonia, the European Union, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia and Sweden.
Poland, Denmark, and Germany also have registers of known wrecks, but the risk assessment and prioritization are yet to be made.
In Latvia and Lithuania, the wreck issue has up till now been classified as of minor importance, the new report says.
However, the growing concern about the possible oil pollution has also raised interest there.
Finally, in Russian territorial waters, there are a lot of wrecks having a high potential for oil pollution, but as it is reported “the interest from authorities seems to be low.”
In Russia, war wrecks belong to the Russian army, and wrecks that are more than 100 years old have the status of archaeological objects.
This new assessment shows that great progress on the issue has been made in several HELCOM contracting parties, especially in Sweden and Finland, where national wreck programs were initiated and several oil removal operations were performed.
In Poland, Denmark, and Estonia, studies and survey operations related to shipwrecks were conducted to identify priority objects and assess the state of the wrecks.
