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I was struck by how many boats were found at the bottom of the black sea. It's deep: 2000m deep at some point(s).
Deep, cold, de-oxygenated water. It preserves some things.
Its northern shores also represent the limit of the Roman Empire, so are the marginal space where trading with other cultures probably happened. Since so much of history is related to trade, the amount of pre-, Roman and post-Roman stuff down there is fascinating, and informative. Boats are wonderful for shipping goods which are too bulky or heavy to fit on pack horses (or camels) -And economically sailing is probably the way to get goods to and from buyer and seller. Not that the silk road didn't work, but if you could stop having to hassle with recalcitrant camels and move to a boat, you could ship goods to Byzantium and it's successor states on the shores of the Black sea very easily.
I wonder how many pre-coal wrecks on the atlantic run are now covered in the trail of ash out of the coal era boats plying the same trade.
Makes me wonder if there may be newer shipwrecks atop older shipwrecks, and we may miss these older interesting finds because the newer ships atop them are considered not worth exploring. Extremely unlikely in the vast ocean but I imagine some very high-traffic areas like near black sea ports or common areas like rock formations this may have happened with some regularity.
Or because they don't want to disturb the newer ships too much when exploring them and never realise there's something even better underneath.
There are almost every year accidents with small old bulker ships (dead weight of 3000-5000 tons) in Black sea. I'm sure their remains stay at the bottom for future generations
There is now rather a lot of detritus on the floor (and surface) of the Black Sea thanks to russian terrorism.
The Black Sea is giant. A couple dozen ships [1] don't really matter pollution-wise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ship_losses_during_the...
We generally have a lot of misconceptions about how extensive trade was in the ancient world. As time goes on we learn it started earlier than we thought and was way more extensive. Consider the Uluburun wreck [1]. This dates from over 3000 years ago and nearly 1000 years earlier than the rise of the Roman Republic.
Goods on this ship come from like 7 different places. One of them, lapis lazuli, had one (known) source in the ancient world: what is now modern day Afghanistan.
We in the West often have this view that Rome was really the start of civilization in many ways. You specifically mention the borders of Rome as a factor. Large empires had risen, lasted centuries and fallen long before Rome existed. The founding of Rome is closer to our time than to the kingdoms and empires of the Tigris-Euphrates region (eg Sumeria, Mesopotamia). The Hittites of Anatolia had extensive writing, libraries and trade. Thanks to the fires in Hattusa firing the clay tablets, we have personal correspondence between the king and the Egyptian pharoah (Ramses II IIRC).
Going even further back and we have evidence of trade 10,000 years earlier (eg obsidian from Turkey popped up all over the place and wheat products were traded in Britain 2,000 years before they farmed it [2]).
Fast forward to the Roman era, and the Republic then Empire and ancient China were known to each other [3] although there's no evidence of direct contact or trade.
[1]: https://www.worldhistory.org/Uluburun_Shipwreck/
[2]: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/02/27/388822209/st...
I used Rome as a focal point. Most Archeology european english speaking people will encounter outside of the long barrows and dolmen of Western Europe is immediate pre-Roman, Roman, or post Roman. Sure, we have long barrows and other pre-roman "stuff" but the vast bulk of excavations now in the UK (for instance) tends to be roman or post-roman, along the route of the HS2 and similar city bound brownfield site development.
I would be surprised if the digs in mainstream Europe routinely turn up a lot of earlier culture: I would expect the opportunistic emergency archeology associated with building and civil engineering is the predominant source of finds, and they tend to be .. well .. roman or post roman.
But your point is well made. History of trade didn't start with Roman conquests or failures, and people sailed the Black sea long long before the Romans got there.
Sure: Euro-centric, western culture centric PoV. I wrote from personal interest. I am sure there is a a shitload of great non-roman Archeology going on outside of the places I know.
I bet Neanderthal and Denosivan's traded. It's natural for humans to swap what they have for what they want.
> We in the West often have this view that Rome was really the start of civilization in many ways.
I find this opinion surprising. Do you think people genuinely not know about Bronze age civilisations? Do they not know about pyramids, which were just as ancient to Caesar as he is to us?
Engineers (or anybody involved in a botched product launch) may be interested in the story of the Vasa. It was a Swedish warship launched in 1627. At the time it was the most powerful warship in the world. It took many years to build at a shipyard in Stockholm within sight of the King's palace. The ship was launched at a public ceremony and made it 1300m out into the harbor. To fire a celebratory salute, its gunports were open. A strong wind came and tilted it over, letting water rush in through the gunports. It sank in minutes. The cause was poor design and a lack of appropriate ballast, rushed into production despite flaws. It sat at the bottom of the harbor for 300 years, perfectly preserved. In the 1970s, the Swedes decided to recover the ship by refloating it. It was a huge effort, but it worked. It has been completely restored and sits in a multi-story museum built around it. I saw it last month and was awestruck by the size and craftmanship. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)
I visited Vasa museum in May this year. It is a beautiful ship and one of its kind, which has been painstakingly restored to full glory indoors ー including the ornate decorations & few of the 46 cannons. They even explained details of years-long restoration process of replacing the wood's moisture entirely with some polymeric binder (can't remember the compound). Every stage with photographs - starting with how they found it, salvaged it & bringing it to current state.
They have even managed to salvage & reconstruct the faces of few of these seamen. It was incredible learning experience about medieval seafaring. Highly recommend, and it is bang next to the Gamle Stan (the old city seen in almost all stock photos of Stockholm).
There are actually three sister ships to the Vasa. One of those called the Apple and was discovered a few ago outside Stockholm.
They are very similar to Vasa but are built slightly smaller in height and about a foot greater in width. The Apple did have the same large sized cannons in the first deck, which was one of the major fault in the design of Vasa. The other two sister ships had smaller cannons on the first deck in order to avoid this problem.
The 1600s are not really considered medieval. The middle ages are mostly considered to have ended with the reformation.
As a funny anecdote engineering students placed a modern miniature statue on the ships deck as a prank just before it was raised ( in Finnish but translation tools help https://fi.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa-jäynä )
Google Translate link: https://fi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Vasa-j%C3%A4y...
for "ice", read "prank"
> The cause was poor design and a lack of appropriate ballast, rushed into production despite flaws.
The Vasa is a textbook case of vanity stakeholders demanding deep last minute changes in complex engineered systems. It wasn't exactly rushed into production, the changes were rushed, not the entire thing.
For anyone visiting Stockholm, make sure to visit the Vasa Museum. So cool
> the most powerful warship in the world.
Prime example of 'theory vs. practice'.
What were the consequences for the engineers
> An inquiry was organized by the Swedish Privy Council to find those responsible for the disaster, but in the end no one was punished.[1]
Someone I know is a hydrographer who charts our local waters and it’s incredible to see how many wrecks they pick up in their multi beam data. Some are very clearly ships, others less obviously; you kind of develop a knack for picking that signal out of the noise.
Apart from ships, there are also the odd aircrafts here and there. Those are far less common from what I’ve seen.
I’d estimate the bays around our city have several dozen wrecks combined. The main harbour has had some removed over the years, but there are around a dozen fairly small and boring wrecks and 3 which recreational divers frequently check out. A little further out and you can actually find an entire barge that lit on fire and sank with like 100 crushed cars on it. So weird. Maybe not all that shocking though, considering one lit on fire with a pile of cars on it just 5 years ago (though it didn’t sink).
It’s a real mess down there.
Not sure how many are still there, since I read that the State of Washington had a campaign about cleaning up derelicts a few years back, but the canals just north of where US Route 2 crosses the Snohomish river by Everett used to have a ton of derelict and sunken boats. I think there are some back-alley marine works up the canal to the east that might be the source of it. I skipped work one day several years ago and took my little boat up that canal to look at a half sunken wooden tugboat (that doesn't seem to be there anymore) and actually saw a derelict motorboat hull, upside down, with its inboard motor removed, just floating down toward the sea. The cops were there at the dock when I landed, trying to figure out if it had flipped in an accident or something.
Is there an "easy" way to do this mapping with local lakes and ponds? Without disturbing/hurting fish and other wildlife?
Not really, the "easy" way is to hook up an enormously expensive multi-beam sonar to a surface vessel.
A more difficult but inexpensive way to start would be to take a single-channel Ping2 transducer: https://bluerobotics.com/store/sensors-sonars-cameras/sonar/... and hook it up to a pan/tilt system and datalogger.
Low-power sonar shouldn't hurt fish. At only 0.2W, even with a 10ms pulse width increasing the instantaneous power output to 20W, that ultrasound pulse is probably not even perceptible to fish. Lots of studies have shown that "fish finders" are not perceptible to fish, and humans typically can't hear them either.
On the other hand, military sonar can have power levels of many kilowatts and sound pressure levels that are literally off the charts, generating forces of 235 dB that cannot be replicated in air at atmospheric pressure. These are known to kill whales, dolphins, and other wildlife! They are even powerful enough to kill or maim humans who happen to be swimming too close to the ship or submarine; navies will use this to deter/repel boarders when docked in potentially hostile locations.
Flanders north sea ship wreck database:
https://wrakkendatabank.afdelingkust.be/
300+ wrecks in a tiny part of one of the busiest seas in the world.
There exists a bigger database of 2000+ wrecks, marked with 1) are there dead people i.e. is it a grave. 2) Are there live or inactive munitions? 3) Are there nasty chemicals. I don't know if they put it online already.
Don't be an idiot and try to dive in there, BTW, these things are dangerous.
Munitions: the SS Richard Montgomery is probably the most nervously watched of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery ; it's probably inert by now, but nobody wants to find out because it's so close to London.
To be clear, the explosives aboard are TNT, which is extremely stable and very likely to remain potent. There has been no study of the affect of the conditions aboard on the degradation of TNT.
However, if the bombs were shipped fuzed (which is not known as the records do not include that data), the fuzes are now likely inert. It significantly reduces the danger of a spontaneous explosion, but does not reduce the power of the explosives should a detonation occur.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2019-07-03/debates/E34CF...
The semicolon following that URL appears to be breaking the automatic link, as it's being interpreted as part of the URL.
I saw a database of historical Roman wrecks. Most of the locations were kept secret.
Here: http://oxrep.classics.ox.ac.uk/databases/shipwrecks_database...
Does the DB you mentioned include these?
I don't know. But most North Sea wrecks are from both world wars, and the sea itself is radared and scanned to death by just about everyone. I don't think you can keep anything down there a secret.
It's also busy. Divers have to attach visible labels to their experiments to make sure other divers don't disturb or steal them.
> The online service wreck site has a catalogue of 209,640 boats known to have sunk, 179,110 of which have a known location. The Global Maritime Wrecks Database (GMWD), on the other hand, contains the records of more than 250,000 sunken vessels, though some of these still haven't been found.
That list would be nowhere near complete.
For example my brother lost a vessel in a hurricane - he was bunkered down on the mainland and it was gone after the storm - we assume the storm surge lifted the anchor off the seafloor and it floated to who knows where and wrecked.
It wasn't insured, so wasn't reported. I suppose it's possible someone stole it, but I can't imagine anyone would be brave/stupid enough to do that during a hurricane.
Maybe someone somewhere in the world got lucky enough to see a drifting abandoned vessel and claimed it... but that's pretty unlikely.
> It wasn't insured, so wasn't reported
Forgive me if this is a dumb question, as I'm not a sailor, but wouldn't one want to report it as at least "missing" since it does have registration? I could see that having at least 2 benefits: if spotted, they can return it, and if involved in something nefarious your brother would have a solid alibi of why it would be in someone else's hands
For some reason I'm now thinking of a drive-by shooting in a sailboat. But suddenly the wind drops, and they can't speed away.
That stood out to me too.
Pretty incredible. We really take for granted the modern connectivity and access of goods and people compared to what human beings had to do for most of history.
Tangentially related: Clive Cussler[0] books are good fun if you're looking for a fiction series about shipwrecks and other nautical adventures.
[0]https://www.amazon.com/stores/Clive-Cussler/author/B000APJ4L...
Atlantis Found is an underrated classic. Indiana Jones esque.
Answer: Between 250,000 and 3 million.
All of the ships ever built minus all of the ships ever repurposed/recycled minus all of the boats that inexplicably end up sitting on a trailer in a desert somewhere. So pretty much all of the ships ever built.
Do you suppose there were triremes just beached out in the Egyptian desert back then, too?
If wrecking was cheaper there and environmental regulations laxer than in Rome, yes!
I grew up on the Oregon coast, and there are some interesting records and histories of Japanese ships washing up on the western shores of the Pacific. Pacific currents will carry all kinds of things from Japan to the coast, including according to some stories, Japanese ships gone adrift in the 1600's.
I can certainly attest to finding glass fishing floats on the coast as a child, and finding what clearly was a beam from a more traditional Japanese house on the Oregon coast some years after the 2011 Japanese earthquake.
My point being I suppose that you can find shipwrecks of surprising origin in places you don't expect.
I could only read the beginning of the article so maybe it was mentioned, but a tangential cause:
I wonder whose money did they embezzle, since insurance companies sure could arrange a check of the condition of ship before insuring it.
It says a new coat of paint over a rotting ship would suffice in those days.
I'm not sure how it is a good deal for the insurer who will have to pay for loss of craft.
It's only a good deal if somebody else ends up footing these bills. I don't believe that England's insurers were so stupid that they would bear such losses for decades without doing something about these.
"It's now possible to build up a picture of the ocean floor even in the deepest water "
With this statement, would it allow them to scan and have a clear picture of things like said shipwrecks? Or is it more geographical?