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Place: Boknis Eck

Location: Exit of Eckernförde Bay, southwestern Kiel Bight. 54°31.77'N, 10°02.36'E.

Owner

Project: Baltic Sea Ecosystem Persona: The Oxygen

Shown

  • A fixed point on the seafloor. 28 metres depth. Two kilometres off the coast of Eckernförde.
  • The sensors. Temperature. Salinity. Oxygen. Chlorophyll. Nutrients. Trace gases. Recording what the water column is doing at this exact location, every month, since 30 April 1957.
  • The research vessel LITTORINA arriving once a month. The water sampler lowered on a cable. The bottles brought up. The measurements taken on deck.
  • The surface above: Eckernförde Bay. The town on the shore. The German Navy torpedo range. The First Submarine Squadron. Both present. Neither acknowledges the other.
  • The water column above the sensors. In spring: cold, mixed, oxygen-rich throughout. In August: stratified. Warm and oxygen-rich above twelve metres. Cold and oxygen-depleted below.
  • The seafloor sediment. Sandy mud. Accumulating. Seasonally hypoxic. In August: sometimes sulfidic. Hydrogen sulfide measurable in the porewater. The sensors record it.
  • The new underwater observatory. Deployed November 2024. Anchored to the seafloor by research divers from Kiel University. Continuous sensors. Real-time data via cable to shore.

Holds

  • The Boknis Eck Time Series. 67 years. Monthly. Nine parameters.
  • The new underwater observatory. Running again after five years of absence.

Offers

  • The paradox. Available to anyone who reads the graph. Nutrients down since the late 1980s. Oxygen still falling. The graph is public. Both lines. One image. Available here without commentary.
  • The time series itself. 67 years of monthly measurements. The longest continuous coastal marine record in the southwestern Baltic.
  • The gap. August 2019 to November 2024. Five years without continuous observatory data. The monthly ship visits continued. The short-term dynamics were not recorded. The gap is in the record. Available as absence.

Withheld

  • What the observatory saw before it disappeared. Installed January 2019. Gone August 2019. Seven months of high-resolution continuous data. The observatory recorded the formation of oxygen minimum zones in real time for the first time. Then it was gone. Where it went: unknown. The navy checked. No vessels were in the area. The shore cable was torn and the station had vanished. What it was beginning to show about the short-term dynamics of the dead zone — the speed of formation, the trigger events — is in the seven months of data that were collected and in the five years of data that were never collected.
  • The baseline before 1957. What Boknis Eck recorded before it was a station. The oxygen in August 1900. The phytoplankton community in 1905. The station began in 1957. The sea had already been under pressure for a decade from postwar agricultural intensification. The sediment below the sensors holds the pre-1957 record. Nobody has asked the sediment in the language the station uses.

place_boknis_eck.md — 25.03.2026 v0.1.0 — KAI Worlds