These elusive relics are unlikely to be evenly distributed. According to an analysis by Unesco, there are over three million resting undiscovered in the world's oceans. In fact, it's thought the shipwrecks that have been documented only represent a small fraction of the total. 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.Īccording to one estimate, around 15,000 ships sank during World War Two alone – there are forgotten battleships and tankers strewn from the Pacific to the Atlantic, gradually bleeding oil, chemicals and heavy metals into the surrounding water as they decay. The online service wreck site has a catalogue of 209,640 boats known to have sunk, 179,110 of which have a known location. There are several databases of the world's shipwrecks, each of which has a slightly different estimate for the total number that has been found. So, how many are there in total – and how many still remain hidden in the depths of the ocean? Like long-forgotten time capsules, these ships have captivated archaeologists and filled museums around the globe with ancient wonders – including a mysterious astronomical clock from Antikythera, which some experts view as the earliest computer. Today the world's oceans are scattered with the debris of millennia of trade, war and exploration – pirate ships loaded with silver, cargo boats along the maritime Silk Road, luxury royal craft that disappeared along with future kings, ancient fishing vessels, modern destroyers and submarines, 19th-Century whalers, and vast passenger liners like the Titanic. Around 50,000 years ago, it's thought that a group of hunter-gatherers from Southeast Asia must have crossed a band of islands hundreds of miles long, because soon afterwards the first Australian Aboriginals turned up at Lake Mungo in New South Wales.Īnd where there are sea crossings, there are wrecks. But there's circumstantial evidence it all started far earlier, with humans suddenly appearing on the other side of vast bodies of water. The oldest known boat was found by accident while a motorway was being built in The Netherlands – a wooden canoe crafted over 10,000 years ago. This week, they announced the discovery of three new wrecks: the ghostly remains of boats dating to the 1st Century BC, 2nd Century AD, and 19th or 20th Century.Īnd according to Unesco's estimates there could be many, many more undiscovered wrecks still to be found beneath the waves of the world's oceans. It has been heavily used for thousands of years – and in that time, it has claimed hundreds of ships. Using multibeam sonar and underwater robots, a team of scientists from eight countries mapped the seafloor in the region. Take the recent Unesco expedition to Skerki Bank, a particularly treacherous shallow reef that links the eastern and western Mediterranean. But there are plenty of submerged wonders still waiting to be discovered. More than 100 years on, the relics at Antikythera, found off the coast of a Greek island on the edge of the Aegean Sea, are still captivating the public. It soon became clear that it was not teeming with cadavers, as it first seemed, but artworks – marble sculptures and bronze statues, seasoned by thousands of years among algae, sponges and fish. It was the spring of 1900, and Stadiatis had accidentally discovered the Antikythera shipwreck – the remains of a Roman cargo vessel that had sunk more than two millennia earlier. As he surfaced in a pool of bubbles, he frantically informed the captain he'd found a heap of rotting corpses. As he squinted into the dim, he took in a haunting scene: all around were the fuzzy outlines of human body parts. Weighed down in a copper diving suit, surrounded by a tangle of breathing tubes, Stadiatis eventually reached the seafloor. When Elias Stadiatis descended into the indigo-blue water, he had a normal day of searching for sponges ahead of him.
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