New technical uses of marine space of the Baltic Sea

The Baltic Sea area has already been intensively used by variety of maritime economic sectors such as marine transport, fishing, tourism, extraction of sand and gravel and oil and gas exploitation. This is also an area of relatively intense military penetration. In addition, this is a place of various other investments, e.g. coastal technical infrastructure (port and transhipment terminals constructions, as well as technical measures of the shoreline defence against transgression of the sea), electrical energy transmission systems (high voltage cables plus large scale electrodes) and natural gas transmission huge pipelines. Over the next decades, the use of the Baltic Sea will expand rapidly, particularly due to constructions of new coastal and offshore wind farms, electrical energy transfer network, further intensification of various forms of shipping, development and construction of new ports and terminals and installing new oil extraction platforms. Some of these activities influences natural spatial distribution of physical properties of the sea space (such as acoustic field, magnetic field, salinity distribution etc.) as well as disturb different natural processes (such as natural coastal dynamics, sedimentation, migration patterns of mobile species etc). In order to present this problem, most important existing activities as well as the most recent large-scale constructions in the Baltic Sea are selected and presented in this study (with emphasis on the Polish Exclusive Economic Zone). Moreover most likely disturbances of natural distributions of physical properties of marine space are analyzed in light of the impact on the environment