The Baltic's undersea map explains most of its incidents

The Baltic is shallow, busy and full of infrastructure. Average depth is around 55 metres and much of the southern basin is far less. Everything crossing it sits close to the surface by the standards of undersea infrastructure, and close to a very large amount of shipping.

What is down there

Power interconnectors link Sweden to Poland, Finland to Estonia, Lithuania to Sweden. Gas lines cross between Finland and Estonia and between Poland and Denmark. Data cables run in dense bundles between the Nordic capitals and onward to Germany.

All of it shares seabed with one of the world’s busiest shipping regions.

Why attribution is genuinely hard

A dragged anchor and a deliberate drag look nearly identical on the seabed. Both leave a furrow; both can sever a cable. The difference is intent, and intent is not visible in the damage.

Investigators work from AIS track data, the vessel’s logs, and whether an anchor was recovered in a state consistent with the track. Each can be degraded — transponders off, logs incomplete, anchors lost.

This is why official findings are slower and more hedged than initial coverage. The hedging is usually honest rather than evasive.

The structural point

Shallow water plus dense traffic plus critical infrastructure produces incidents at some baseline rate regardless of intent. That baseline makes deliberate action cheap to attempt and hard to prove — a geographic condition, not a policy failure.

Reported by Reuters and the BBC; analysis ours.