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Shipwreck of the Thistlegorm in the Red Sea, Egypt
Item Information
- Author: Zaria Gorvett
- Rolle, BBC Future
June 25, 2023
One day, in the middle of spring, Elias Stadiatis, as usual, dived into the blue sea to look for sponges. Wearing a copper wet suit and surrounded by a tangle of breathing tubes, he descended to the bottom of the ocean.
As Stadiatis tried to see in the darkness, he faced a terrifying scene: blurred silhouettes of human body parts were everywhere.
The year is 1900. Stadiatis had accidentally discovered the wreck of the Antikythera the remains of a Roman cargo ship that had sunk more than two thousand years earlier.
It quickly became clear that these were not corpses, as it seemed at first glance, but works of art bronze statues and marble sculptures that spent thousands of years on the seabed among algae, sponges and fish.
More than 100 years later, the relics of Antikythera, found off the coast of one of the Greek islands in the Aegean, still attract public attention. But there are many other sunken relics that have yet to be discovered.
An example is the recent Unesco expedition to the Skerki Bank, a shallow and very treacherous reef connecting the eastern and western Mediterranean Sea. The area has been navigable for thousands of years and hundreds of ships have sunk there during that time.
Using multibeam sonars and underwater robots, a team of scientists from eight countries mapped the seabed in this region and announced the discovery of three new shipwrecks: 1stcentury BC shipwrecks; 2nd century B.C. and the 19th century or 20 AD
hidden record
But there is evidence that navigation would have started much earlier, when people suddenly appeared on the other side of vast oceans, seas, rivers and lakes.
It is believed that about 50,000 years ago a group of huntergatherers from Southeast Asia crossed a strip of islands several hundred kilometers long just before the first indigenous peoples appeared at Lake Mungo in New South Wales, Australia.
And where sea voyages take place, shipwrecks are inevitable.
After millennia of trade, warfare, and exploration, the planet’s seabeds are littered with debris pirate ships laden with silver, freighters along the maritime stretch of the Silk Road, royal luxury ships that vanished with monarchs and future kings, ancient fishing boats, modernday destroyers, and U Boats, 19thcentury whalers and huge passenger ships like the Titanic.
Like longforgotten time capsules, these ships have fascinated archaeologists and brought ancient marvels to museums around the world, including the mysterious astronomical clock on Antikythera, which some experts believe was the first humanbuilt computer.
But how many shipwrecks are there in the world? How many of these are still hidden in the depths of the ocean?
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The wreck of the Roman ship Antikythera preserved, among other things, a cargo of valuable marble sculptures and ancient bronze statues.
There are several databases of information on shipwrecks around the world. They each give a slightly different estimate of the total amount ever found.
The wreck website has cataloged 209,640 known shipwrecks. Of these, the location of 179,110 is known.
According to one estimate, around 15,000 ships sank in World War II alone (19391945).
In fact, the documented shipwrecks are thought to represent only a small fraction of the total.
These hidden relics are unlikely to be evenly distributed. It’s easy to imagine that there are shipwreck hotspots sea cemeteries along popular or dangerous routes that have historically proved fertile ground for searching.
In addition to the Greek archipelago of Fourni in the Mediterranean, these points also include the Skerki Bank, where 58 ships have already been found.
The Fourni Archipelago is not considered particularly dangerous, but has often been used as an anchor point. Therefore, it is believed that the enormous volume of traffic was responsible for the high concentration of shipwrecks in this location.
treasure collection
This collection of hidden debris, waiting to be discovered, contains fascinating details about people’s lives in the past and possible risks for the future. And it can also contain surprising riches that can be problematic.
On June 8, 1708, at about seven o’clock at night, a tremendous explosion resounded over the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Colombia. It was the last sound of battle from the galleon San José, which had left Spain two years earlier.
The ship was part of the Spanish Treasure Fleet a convoy of ships loaded with sugar, spices, precious metals and other goods transported between Spain and its American colonies. The San José was the flagship of the fleet and her cargo was the most valuable: chests full of silver, emeralds and a huge amount of gold doubloons.
During a skirmish with a British ship, he was badly shipwrecked. After hours of fighting, her gunpowder stores were hit and she sank almost instantly, disappearing into the sea with about 600 crew members.
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Since discovering the Spanish galleon San José, researchers have discovered two other ships that sank in waters off the coast of Colombia more than two years ago.
was golden
This type of argument could soon become much more common.
Historically, many wrecks have been found in relatively shallow water, sometimes accidentally, by fishermen, scientists or treasure hunters exploring the seabed near shore.
But access to sophisticated submersibles, modern cameras, and new sonar technology has made finding sunken ships at greater depths much easier. It is now possible to create images of the seabed even in the deepest waters.
Just as the use of sonar and GPS revolutionized fishing and made it possible to identify entire schools of tuna in the open sea, now anyone can use the same technologies to find shipwrecks in places no one previously suspected existed.
But even today, many undiscovered wrecks lurk in the dark depths, including some of the most famous.
One of them is the Waratah, a huge cargo and passenger ship that is often compared to the Titanic.
It left Durban on July 26, 1909 with 211 passengers on board bound for Cape Town, South Africa and just disappeared.
To this day nobody knows what happened to the ship or where the colossus of the sea sank. At least nine expeditions have tried to locate the debris, all without success.
Who knows what’s next? One thing is for sure: it won’t be long before we find out.