The three-year-lng project, which has been called “Baltwreck”, brings together 14 partners from Poland’s Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Germany, Lithuania and Sweden.

According to the researchers, there are around 20,000 known military and civilian ship wrecks at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

As many as 10 percent of them are polluting the sea with the remains of decomposed ammunition or fuel leakage of carcinogenic pyrolysis oil.

Wreck management methods, involving detection and removal practices, will be put in place to prevent massive chemical contamination of the sea.

An analysis of the impact of sunken ammunition on marine ecosystems will also be carried out.

The coordination of "Baltwreck" is handled by the Institute of Fluid-Flow Machinery of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IMP PAN).

The total project budget is €3.83 million, of which €3.06 million comes from the European Regional Development Fund.