Assomo told Prensa Latina, during a meeting with journalists in that capital, that the mission carried out last year to search for new wrecks in the Skerki Banks and to document the wrecks already discovered in the Sicilian Channel emphasizes the importance of the 2001 instrument for the conservation of Items of great value to humanity lying on the seabed.
The convention has a future and this multinational effort represents a model that we will emulate in other regions of the world, he said.
At Unesco headquarters, researchers and officials from Algeria, Croatia, Egypt, Spain, France, Italy, Morocco and Tunisia presented the results of the mission, which was carried out in Mediterranean waters in August and September last year.
The project, the first of its kind under the 2001 Convention, enabled the discovery of three new wrecks on the Skerki Banks (Tunisia), one of them at least two thousand years old and the other two from the 19th or 20th centuries.
On the Italian continental shelf, in turn, it enabled the documentation in high-resolution images of the remains of three Roman-era wrecks found between 1980 and 2000 at a depth of more than 700 meters.
Assomo welcomed the fact that several countries have pooled both human and scientific, financial and technical resources, in the latter case modern technology capable of probing the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea in the Skerki Banks thanks to multibeam sonar and technology and in the Sicilian Channel to explore vehicles and document remote-controlled submarines.
The representative of the Tunisian Ministry of Culture, Ahmed Gadhoum, also emphasized the fruits of the international cooperation of this mission and the relevance of joint efforts to protect underwater heritage.
The Tunisian official also explained to Prensa Latina how valuable this experience is to better understand the past and contribute to the preservation of objects related to it.
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