Planned World Wars Don't End Very Well For Some People: Norway Discovers Thousands Of Missiles Dumped Into Lakes

The Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) has investigated four dumping areas in lake Mjøsa, from Gjøvik down to Totenvika.

Ammunition has been dumped from Raufoss and the Norwegian Armed Forces in Mjøsa from 1940 until 1970.

Earlier it was said that between 100 and 200 tonnes had been dumped in total, mainly ammunition for handguns.

Additionally, an area of the bottom of the lake is covered by around a thousand Sidewinder missiles, FFI stated in a press release.

The Raufoss Ammunition Factory test-fired the air-to-air missile Sidewinder for years from Fjellhaug, in Eastern Norway.

The three-metre-long rockets landed in the water four to six kilometres from the launch pad. Around a thousand of them sank to a depth of 3-400 metres in a concentrated area.

According to FFI, they are still tightly packed and are clearly visible in the images captured by the institute's underwater vehicle during its expedition last autumn.

“We are reasonably confident that these missiles pose little environmental risk. There are probably no explosives in them. In practice, this is a large collection of empty aluminium tubes,” the researchers say, who presented their preliminary findings during the Ocean Week event in Gjøvik last week.