It has been estimated that three million shipwrecks lie strewn on the seabed across the globe. Most of them will never be found, but since the 2010s researchers have uncovered even the oldest and deepest wrecks. What’s behind the acceleration of discovery?
According to David L. Mearns, author of The Shipwreck Hunter: A Lifetime of Amazing Discoveries at the Bottom of the Ocean, Wreck hunting has become more successful for a few key reasons. First, documents from all over the world have been digitized and are therefore more easily accessible. And secondly, remote underwater technology has advanced so that the actual work of searching for wrecks has become much more efficient.
WATCH: Ernest Shackleton’s lost ice ship has been found! Don’t miss Shackleton’s Endurance: The Lost Ice Ship Found. Premieres Tuesday, March 22 at 10/9c.
Research goes digital
Typically, most wreck-finding missions start by scouring the archives, before anyone goes to sea. ? Can we find it in a reasonable time with a definable budget?
That said, Mearns – who has discovered 26 major shipwrecks around the world – acknowledges that even careful searches have become much easier.
“Many documents are digitized, so you don’t necessarily have to visit each archive yourself,” he says. “What I can do in an archive in a day would take me at least a week or two, and that’s just the efficiency of the archive.”
AUVs and ROVs make research easier
The Endurance22 crew deploys a specially designed underwater drone to search for the wreckage of Endurance in the Weddell Sea.
Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust and Nick Birtwistle
Once research reveals an ideal hunting ground, explorers have much better tools to then carry out the research. In particular, Mearns notes, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) allow explorers to penetrate almost any depth of the ocean. These vehicles also allow explorers to expand their targeted search areas.
“We can cover a lot of ground in terms of the search, we can extend the search area if the clues aren’t very good or vague, so that opens the door to finding more wrecks,” he says.
The March 2022 discovery of the wreckage of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition ship Endurance owed much to the use of advanced technology and a research vessel capable of shearing ice with an ease that Shackleton could only dream of in 1915. This vessel, the S.A. Agulhas, was built in 2012 to supply Antarctic bases in South Africa and was fully equipped to navigate through the notoriously difficult pack ice of the Weddell Sea, where Endurance had been crashed 107 years previously.
At 440 feet long and nearly 13,000 tons, it is three times longer and 37 times heavier than the doomed ship he found on the Antarctic seabed. When he arrived at the approximate location of the Endurance wreckage, he deployed a robot called Sabertooth, which was able to descend 10,000 feet, using sonar to search for the wreckage and cameras to film it, while Needles blew up her propellers to keep the immediate area ice-free and her crew checked satellite data to guard against ice encroachment.
PHOTOS: Check out footage of the Endurance wreck found in the Weddell Sea
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Frank Worsley’s navigation made finding endurance easier
But the Needles was able to target the approximate location in the first place due to diligent measurement and recording by the Endurance captain, Frank Worsley, when the ship sank on November 21, 1915. Although Worsley of course was unable to record the ship’s position with the pinpoint accuracy afforded by today’s GPS systems, his calculations carried considerable weight due to its deserved reputation. as master navigator.
Worsley guided the Endurance boats from the pack ice on which the crew was stranded at Elephant Island, where most of them waited while Worsley, Shackleton and four others took one of the boats to find rescue at South Georgia, which they reached after 16 days of battling storms and waves, while Worsley methodically recorded their positions and plotted their course.
Worsley’s navigation skills have enabled everyone involved in the search for Endurance confidence that the vessel could be found; but even so, explorers would have dug deep into the records to find as much supporting evidence as possible.
The reaction of the public to the discovery of Endurance highlights an enduring public fascination with shipwrecks, which Mearns attributes to “an innate curiosity to discover something and solve what is not known. And we make these unknowns known. We bring history to life. It is rare on earth to be able to discover something that people have never heard of. But because of the depth and darkness of the oceans, there are literally hundreds of thousands of mysteries left to uncover.
Discoveries of wrecks
In August 2019, a team of archaeologists explored the wreckage of the HMS Terror using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). Here, a storage compartment is shown partly covered in silt and marine life. Learn more here.
Parks Canada Agency
Below are some of the most publicized shipwrecks discovered or identified this century, often as a result of archival research, modern technology, or a combination of both.
Endurance: The ship of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition became trapped in the ice of the Weddell Sea in February 1915 and was never freed. By October, Endurance began to warp under the grip of the ice, and on November 2 it was crushed and sunk, remaining invisible to human eyes for 107 years.
Shipwreck in the Black Sea: Discovered in 2018 by a team from the Black Sea Marine Archeology Project, the ship sank more than 2,400 years ago, 50 miles off the coast of Bulgaria. It is the oldest intact wreck ever discovered. “A surviving ship intact from the classical world, lying in over 2km of water, is something I never thought possible,” said Professor Jon Adams, the lead researcher on the team that found the ship. ‘wreck. “It will change our understanding of shipbuilding and navigation in the ancient world.”
Emerald: This Portuguese carrack sank off Oman in 1503 while under the command of Vasco da Gama’s uncle, Vicente Sodré. First discovered in 1998 and then extensively excavated by a team led by David Mearns between 2013 and 2015, it is the oldest recovered shipwreck from the Age of Exploration in Europe.
Graubünden: The flagship of John, King of Denmark caught fire and sank in the Baltic Sea in 1495. There it remained unknown until members of a local diving club discovered it in the 1970s; unaware of its significance, they did not report it to archaeologists until 2000, and it was not until 2013 that the identity of the wreck was confirmed. Analysis of the timbers showed that they were made from oak trees felled in the winter of 1482-1483. Considered one of the best-preserved wrecks of the time, she slowly revealed her secrets, with archaeologists uncovering details such as well-preserved sturgeon stored in a barrel in the ship’s pantry.
Erebus and Terror: These two ships left the Thames on May 19, 1845, carrying 128 officers and men under the command of Sir John Franklin, in search of the Northwest Passage. When the ships did not return, a series of expeditions were sent to find them. These expeditions uncovered evidence that the crew had all perished, and a note revealing that the ships had been abandoned in April 1848. But the ships themselves were not found until Erebus was discovered in 2014, and Terror was found two years later, near where Inuit oral tradition had long claimed it was.
Queen Anne’s Revenge: Originally a French slave ship called Concord, this powerful ship was captured in November 1717 by the famous pirate Edward “Blackbeard” Teach, who used it to plunder several ships off the Atlantic coast and even, in April 1718, blockade the port of Charleston, Carolina from South. It struck a sandbar and sank off North Carolina in June; the wreckage was discovered in 1996 and its identity confirmed in 2011.
The Black Swan: In May 2007, a Florida-based company called Odyssey Marine Exploration announced that, using underwater robots, it had discovered a shipwreck in the Atlantic which it named “Black Swan”. The wreck yielded 17 tons of gold and silver coins, worth an estimated $500 million. However, the Spanish government claimed that the wreckage was the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes, a Spanish frigate that sank off the coast of Portugal in 1804 following a battle with four British naval vessels. After a long legal battle, the treasure was returned to Spain in 2012.
