The area where the Russian pipeline extends to the bottom of the Baltic Sea off the coast of Sweden is no longer blocked. Journalists of the Swedish newspaper L’Espresso have, with the help of the Norwegian Trond Larsen of the Norwegian company Blueye Robotics, investigated the area with an underwater drone.
At a depth of 80 meters, there are wide channels in the sea floor and pieces that look like broken pieces of pipes. At least 50 meters of the pipeline have disappeared or buried under the seabed, the newspaper said.
– It takes extreme force to bend thick metal like this, says Larsen of the images.
The Nord Stream 1 consists of 12 meter long sections welded together. The external diameter is 1.4 meters and with a concrete cover outside the thickness of one decimeter. The force of the explosion that tore the tube apart was so strong it had a magnitude of 2.3 on seismic measurements.
