underwater-observatory-disappeared

Summary

September 6, 2019: An underwater laboratory has gone missing from the bottom of a bay near Kiel, Germany. The lab was full automated, consisting of two heavy desk-sized machines that weigh over 1,500 pounds (~ 700 kg). The machines measured concentrations of salt, methane, oxygen and carbon dioxide in the water, as well as recording the temperature. The devices have a value of over $330,000 (~ 300,000 Euros). All that remains of the machines is a severed cable that they used to transmit their data back to shore with. It is unknown whether the disappearance was due to theft, storm activity, or animal attack.

Source

Bibliography

1. Original article at CNN

Game and Story Use

• Could be the first signs of a sea monster that has moved into the area. To move such heavy equipment, it would have to be a big one.
• A supervillain could be at work poisoning the environment, or working on some sort of superscience experiment that has a side effect of skewing the normal ratio of one of the above chemicals. They took the devices to cover their tracks, figuring a general suspicion that someone is up to something is better than a specific clue that a particular chemical is coming from the direction of their undersea base.
  • Or, the villain needed parts from those machines to create his device.
  • It could also be a more mundane case of an industrial polluter, or a climate-change-denier attempting to stymie attempts to track the chemical status of the bay, but that's a lot less interesting than full on mad science.
• It could be a precursor to (or the evidence after) an espionage attempt, where some sort of mini-submarine or spetsnaz team was worried their covert activities would be recorded by the lab, so they cut the cord and scuttled it.
• The device never worked - the manufacturer recovered it to prevent the customer from noticing that they had spent a great deal of money of commissioning some useless junk.
• It just annoyed the Deep Ones.