Natalie Wolchover, writer at Life's Little Mysteries, has written an article (here) that claims that the "Anomaly" is a glacial deposit. Or, to put it more bluntly, a bunch of rocks, which is what I suspected it was right from the get-go. The most interesting thing about her article is the part that describes how Peter Lindberg, leader of the Ocean X team, contacted Volker Brüchert, an associate professor of geology at Stockholm University, and supposedly got Brüchert to agree that the "Anomaly" was unexplainable as a natural formation.
Lindberg only released one quote from his interview with Brüchert, following Lindberg's providing Brüchert with a black rock from the "Anomaly" site to study. "I was surprised when I researched the material, I found a great black stone that could be a volcanic rock," Brüchert told Lindberg. "My hypothesis is that this object, this structure was formed during the Ice Age many thousands of years ago."
Implying, of course, that the "Anomaly" can't be explained by science, and therefore must be (1) a crashed UFO site, (2) a sunken Nazi superweapon, (3) a remnant of the lost civilization of Atlantis, or (4) any of the other bizarre suggestions that people associated with researching the "Anomaly" have made.
Of course, it turns out that Brüchert never meant to imply any such thing. Reporters at Life's Little Mysteries took the expedient of contacting Brüchert, and asking him in more detail what he thought.
"It's good to hear critical voices about this 'Baltic Sea mystery,'" Brüchert responded in an email. "What has been generously ignored by the Ocean-X team is that most of the samples they have brought up from the sea bottom are granites and gneisses and sandstones." He then goes on to state that this is exactly what you'd expect to see if the "Anomaly" is a glacial deposit, which would be no surprise given that the Baltic Sea was largely carved out by glaciers.
"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," he wrote. "Possibly these rocks were transported there by glaciers."
So, an expert has weighed in on the subject, and has a perfectly conventional explanation, as I suspected.
The problem is, I did what I should never do, and scrolled to the bottom of the article and looked at the "Comments" section. A sampling:
- Who's to say stories like Atlantis and the Biblical Flood aren't merely memories of such a widespread calamity?
- Being a skeptic requires no knowledge and no investigation of evidence or facts. Anyone can be a skeptic. Congrats Natalie, you are ordinary.
- What in the hell are you people trying to hide? This needs to be explored much more deeply and we need to be told what this thing really is, how it got there, and why it is still there. Frankly, we just need the truth and "glacial deposit" is certainly not it. It is plain this thing has been manufactured by someone, at someplace, at some time. It's not just a fluke of nature.
- Probably some sort of space ship the "authorities" don't wan't [sic] anyone to know about!
- This report is very misleading. The object was never ID. People only gave an explaination [sic] how it end up there. We still don't know what it is and where it come from !!!!
- Well if this is an accurate depiction than it has to be a design from an intelligent source man made or what ever. There are to [sic] many perfect geometric shapes and lines, a glacier or volcanic deposit I think not.
It's not that I don't sympathize with the sentiment that it would be cool if the "Anomaly" was something beyond what science currently can explain. No one would be more thrilled than me if it was a downed spacecraft, or a remnant of a hitherto-unknown human civilization. And if there really was evidence of something like that, real scientists -- the people whose day-to-day lives are spent pushing the boundaries of what we know, who live for opportunities to study things that haven't yet been explained -- would be tripping over themselves to analyze it. The fact that a real, working geologist has taken a look at the hard evidence (a sample of the "Anomaly") and said, basically, "Meh," is pretty indicative of the likelihood that there isn't anything much there to study.
And now, I really have said all I have to say on the subject, unless Lindberg and his team unearth something a lot more earthshattering than they have done so far. As I've said before: I am perfectly ready to eat crow and print a retraction if it turns out that there really is something weird down there. Until that time, I'm siding with Brüchert. Oh, and one other thing: I really need to stop reading the "Comments" sections on articles, because I don't need any further reasons to faceplant directly onto my keyboard.
