The people of Northern Europe woke in late September 2022 to a strange sight in the Baltic: a patch of churning sea, a kilometre wide, where methane from the Nord Stream pipelines was boiling up from below. For the families and industries that had spent a year watching gas politics with dread, the meaning was immediate and personal. Somebody, it appeared, had blown up the pipes.
That, at least, is what European leaders said openly. Reporting in The Guardian on September 27, 2022 described the leading politicians of Europe lining up behind one word, sabotage, after seismologists registered explosion-like signals near the ruptures.
What the instruments recorded
The first hard data came from the ground under the sea. A seismograph on Bornholm, the Danish island close to the leak sites, twice recorded spikes on the Monday when both Nord Stream lines suffered dramatic pressure losses, according to the German geological research centre GFZ. The station had been near-silent until just after midnight GMT, when it caught a tremor followed by a continuous hissing waveform; the pattern repeated at 5pm GMT. Scientists at GFZ ruled out natural earthquakes as the cause of the leaks, though the centre would not confirm the tremors were explosions.
Swedish instruments were less cautious. Björn Lund of the Swedish National Seismic Network, which logs both earthquakes and explosions, told Swedish television that one signal registered a magnitude of 2.3 and may have come from undersea detonations. “You can clearly see how the waves bounce from the bottom to the surface”, he said. “There is no doubt that it was a blast.”
Leaders call it deliberate
European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen blamed “sabotage” and promised the “strongest possible response” to any deliberate disruption of the continent’s energy infrastructure. Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen called the ruptures deliberate acts: “We are not talking about an accident.” Three separate leaks opening almost simultaneously, at distance from one another, made a random accident hard to credit, she added; anonymous German government voices reached the same conclusion. “Our imagination cannot come up with a scenario which isn’t a deliberate attack”, one person involved in the investigation told the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel.
Nobody in office named a culprit. Poland’s prime minister tied the damage to “the next step of escalation of the situation in Ukraine”, while Sweden’s foreign minister refused to speculate on motives or actors. In Moscow, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, called the news “very concerning” and said no option, including sabotage, could yet be ruled out.
The damage on the seabed
The pipes were built to take punishment. Each has a steel wall 4.1 cm (1.6 inches) thick, coated in steel-reinforced concrete up to 11 cm; every section weighs 11 tonnes before concrete and 24 to 25 tonnes after. The damaged stretches lie between 80 and 110 metres down. The Danish energy agency, which found the first breaches northeast of Bornholm and a third in Swedish waters, put the scale bluntly: “This is not a small crack. It’s a really big hole”, the agency said. A five-mile shipping exclusion zone went up around the island, with flights banned below 1,000 metres.
What it meant for the gas supply
The human side of the story, an anxious continent heading into winter, was milder than the imagery suggested. Nord Stream 2 had never delivered fuel; Germany cancelled it just before the invasion of Ukraine, though it was full of gas, and pressure inside fell from 105 to 7 bar overnight. Nord Stream 1 had been shut indefinitely by Russia at the start of September. With no gas moving through either line since early that month, German officials said the leaks would not derail plans to fill storage tanks before winter, and Danish authorities noted that methane partly dissolves in water and is not toxic in limited quantities. Environmental groups still warned of a greenhouse effect contribution as the gas reached the air.
Who carried out the attacks remained unresolved. Analysts pointed at the vulnerability of other marine infrastructure; one UK insider speculated mines dropped from a disguised commercial vessel and detonated later, a scenario everyone conceded was hypothetical. The lesson that September week, for leaders and households alike, was that the infrastructure beneath the sea had become part of the war.
Sources
- European leaders blame sabotage as gas pours into Baltic from Nord Stream pipelines | Nord Stream 1 pipeline | The Guardian
- Who Did It? More Evidence Points to US-NATO Sabotage of Nord Stream – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization
