Wow!2,400 year old shipwreck found intact 2km deep in Black Sea.

[Dubdrifter]

Check this out ..... https://www.theguardian.com/science...at-bottom-of-black-sea?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Mind blowing discovery .... more to come from this research survey apparently. Looks like the Black Sea could be the new environment to pioneer deep underwater excavation using remote submersibles.

 

[ucfgrad93]

Wow, that is pretty amazing.

 

[Dubdrifter]

If Ballard and Co ..... and all those firms pioneering deep water submersibles can equip their machines with the extension arms and tools to enable archaeologists to do fine detailed ‘remote’ controlled excavations in these sorts of environments ...... especially in the Black Sea where it appears, from deep water scans, there is so much potential ..... maybe we will see ship wrecks like this raised from the depths, possibly intact to be preserved for all to see in the museums of tomorrow.

 

[v3rlon]

Maybe we can finally find Atlantis - just in time for the movie!

 

[Dubdrifter]

Archaeological excavations in Santorini suggest the destruction of the Minoan civilisation there closely resembles the fabled legend that Homer and others described as the Atlantean culture.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrotiri_(Santorini)

.... and the movies are probably the last place you would go if you want an accurate picture of historical events!

 

[v3rlon]

Archaeological excavations in Santorini suggest the destruction of the Minoan civilisation there closely resembles the fabled legend that Homer and others described as the Atlantean culture.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrotiri_(Santorini)

.... and the movies are probably the last place you would go if you want an accurate picture of historical events!

I was referring to Aquaman

But you are correct:
Don’t learn history from movies.

Don’t learn science from movies, either (I’d love to arrange JJ Abrams a good ol’ DeGrasse kicking by the famed Astrophysicist on how far away the closest planet is, never mind the stars).

Don’t learn medicine from movies (we found a guy that’s immune! We can stop the world ravaging plague in 24 hours).

Don’t learn cars from movies (a car chase between a 911 and a panel van lasts until the Porsche driver pushes the long skinny pedal on the right)

Don’t learn dating from movies (unless you actually look like the people in movies).

Don’t learn writing from movies. Being a reporter is a real job that takes a full work week to do every week (and how writers get writing wrong is a great mystery to me).

Don’t learn guns from movies (not only do they run out of ammo, but extra ammo is heavy. Shooting is loud, and oh yes, that shot IS impossible).

In fact, movies are a worse source of education than your conspiracy theorist uncle. Just don’t do it.

 

[Tigger11]

If Ballard and Co ..... and all those firms pioneering deep water submersibles can equip their machines with the extension arms and tools to enable archaeologists to do fine detailed ‘remote’ controlled excavations in these sorts of environments ...... especially in the Black Sea where it appears, from deep water scans, there is so much potential ..... maybe we will see ship wrecks like this raised from the depths, possibly intact to be preserved for all to see in the museums of tomorrow.

Raising a wreck like that intact is probably not possible and even if possible would be hugely cost prohibitive. The Monitor is much younger (Civil War), and in much shallower water 300 feet or so (so 10 atmospheres) and the raising and salvage of it was estimated in the $100M range, which is why we just have pieces of it in the museum. You are looking at something much further from shore, over 180 atmospheres down, and over 15x older and much much more fragile. Its not worth a billion dollars or more to salvage intact if it were even possible.
-Tig

 

[Scepticalscribe]

Raising a wreck like that intact is probably not possible and even if possible would be hugely cost prohibitive. The Monitor is much younger (Civil War), and in much shallower water 300 feet or so (so 10 atmospheres) and the raising and salvage of it was estimated in the $100M range, which is why we just have pieces of it in the museum. You are looking at something much further from shore, over 180 atmospheres down, and over 15x older and much much more fragile. Its not worth a billion dollars or more to salvage intact if it were even possible.
-Tig

One of the most interesting (and successful) but incredibly time-consuming maritime salvage operations that I have read about (and seen, as I spent a full day in the Vasa Museum) is that of the Vasa, which sank in 1628 (in calm waters) on her maiden voyage, in Stockholm's harbour area.

Fortunately, Vasa sank in shallow waters , and the chemical composition of the water meant that it was astonishingly well preserved when it was located again in the mid 20th century. However, the salvage operation required an incredible amount of planning and preparation, research and work and an enormous budget, which the Swedish authorities were happy to pay; something which is well preserved in anaerobic water will not long remain that way once exposed to surface conditions.

 

[cube]

One of the most interesting (and successful) but incredibly time-consuming maritime salvage operations that I have read about (and seen, as I spent a full day in the Vasa Museum) is that of the Vasa, which sank in 1628 (in calm waters) on her maiden voyage, in Stockholm's harbour area.

Fortunately, Vasa sank in shallow waters , and the chemical composition of the water meant that it was astonishingly well preserved when it was located again in the mid 20th century. However, the salvage operation required an astonishing amount of planning and preparation, research and work and an enormous budget, which the Swedish authorities wee happy to pay; something which is well preserved in anaerobic water will not long remain that way once exposed to surface conditions.

Amazing museum.

 

[Scepticalscribe]

Amazing museum.

Agreed. It is absolutely brilliant.

Some years ago, I spent a full day there, and was kicked out half an hour after closing time.

 

[cube]

Agreed. It is absolutely brilliant.

Some years ago, I spent a full day there, and was kicked out half an hour after closing time.

I think I went to a free Roxette concert nearby straight out of there in the evening.

 

[Dubdrifter]

https://www.dogonews.com/2018/11/11...discovered-in-black-sea-dates-back-2400-years

This article with a little more detail suggest they can’t even get funding to determine the cargo! So sadly raising it will only happen if a couple of billionaires ‘crowd fund’ it.

Archaeology projects so essential for humanity’s education are constantly held back or abandoned due to insufficient funding. Billionaires can gain good publicity and considerable respect benefitting society - like writing a cheque periodically to keep educational institutions like Wikipedia alive ...... (and not having to beg for money every few months) ..... and funding projects like the huge challenge of raising this ship .... could inspire people, scientists, engineers and historians across the board ..... and push new techniques and pioneer new technological advancement in this area of exploration, excavation and deep water retrieval.

Things have moved on since the Vasa and Mary Rose ...... and this wreck is relatively intact on the surface so maybe costs could be more moderate than some early estimates ..... which all boil down to what technique is employed to dismantle or lift this historic maritime ‘jewel’ .....
We have a unique opportunity here .... let’s not delay on this extraction. We have the abilities to preserve these ship’s timbers on the surface. Trying to tackle this later when the timber state is even more fragile ..... is that wise?

 

[millerj123]

Raising a wreck like that intact is probably not possible and even if possible would be hugely cost prohibitive. The Monitor is much younger (Civil War), and in much shallower water 300 feet or so (so 10 atmospheres) and the raising and salvage of it was estimated in the $100M range, which is why we just have pieces of it in the museum. You are looking at something much further from shore, over 180 atmospheres down, and over 15x older and much much more fragile. Its not worth a billion dollars or more to salvage intact if it were even possible.
-Tig

Oh, Tig, you and your "pressure" this and "atmospheres" that, finishing with "worth" and "possible" make it sound like you aren't on board at all. Sad. :-(

 

[Scepticalscribe]

I think I went to a free Roxette concert nearby straight out of there in the evening.

I went for a coffee with the Swedish friend who accompanied me to the museum and we discussed what we had seen. An awesome place.

As for @Dubdrifter's remark that "things have moved on since the Vasa and the Mary Rose"...

Might I ask precisely how?

Apart from the depth, (which is deeper, and thus, more challenging than was the case with either the Mary Rose or the Vasa), and the cost (which will be prohibitive), I suspect that the main scientific or technical challenges would not actually be about the actual extraction of the vessel from the seabed, but of the specific challenge of preserving it once it has been extracted, not least because this vessel is far older than were either the Mary Rose or the Vasa.

 

[Tigger11]

https://www.dogonews.com/2018/11/11...discovered-in-black-sea-dates-back-2400-years

Things have moved on since the Vasa and Mary Rose ...... and this wreck is relatively intact on the surface so maybe costs could be more moderate than some early estimates ..... which all boil down to what technique is employed to dismantle or lift this historic maritime ‘jewel’ .....
We have a unique opportunity here .... let’s not delay on this extraction. We have the abilities to preserve these ship’s timbers on the surface. Trying to tackle this later when the timber state is even more fragile ..... is that wise?

Three thoughts.

1) Its an interesting wreck because of its age, but not sure its near as important as you seem to be making it. Its 75 foot old greek ship, which may have almost nothing aboard. It could cost 100s of millions or more to carry out a salvage that the ship might not survive.

2) Where does the ship go if it were salvaged? Obviously if the map is correct its closest to Bulgaria, but salvaging a Greek ship is likely to get the Greeks involved as well as we know from the Mercedes salvage of a few years ago when Spain was granted the treasure despite it not being found in Spanish waters.

3) 2017 was a banner year for Submersibles with almost 30 of them sold. HOWEVER, there are about a dozen submersibles on the planet that can do 2KM+ depth, most of them do 300 feet, 500 feet, 1000 feet, the real expensive ones do 1KM (1000M, 3300 feet). And of those dozen, 3 of them are currently in probate, so there isnt alot of equipment that can go down to work on such a salvage. All the salvages we are talking about here, (Monitor, Vasa, Mary Rose) were carried out by diver hitting deep depths for divers, here we are talking about a salvage at a depth where the number of people who have experience in a submerible at that depth is very very small, and there has never been a large scale salvage from that depth, especially not on an entire ship.

How do you keep the salinity the same on the boat as you transition it up 2 km? How do you keep the structure from twisting etc. The Wreck has been down there 2400 years, I dont know why you think its going to get in significantly worse shape by staying down there awhile longer.
-Tig

 

[Dubdrifter]

You are right .... it’s only a merchant vessel, the interest is mainly in the ancient ship construction ..... and cargoes from that period have been retrieved before ..... it’s not under threat from rapid decay, nor does it need to be removed in a hurry.

These governments haven’t the spare money to fund projects like this ....... only super rich Internet multi billionaires who have dodged enough tax could possibly take on this ‘vanity’ project ...... haven’t a clue if it would claw back the costs if raised ..... be interesting to know how much money the Vasa and Mary Rose museums have generated over the years against conservation costs ...... would a project as challenging as this ever break even or make a profit in the long term? .... the specialist submersibles will cost a fortune ..... as will the specialist man hours to operate them from beginning to end plus costs of lifting rigs and expensive specialist conservation techniques. Museum build+presentation costs.

There are plenty of reasons to walk away.

The trouble is humans like a challenge, and like to push boundaries in exploration.

Before they walk away, it would be interesting to retrieve just a few different sample types from the wreck, just to test their durability to slow decompression and how they react to de-salination - then if a future project manager is appointed ...... he will have some inkling what the challenges are retrieving very old stuff from this depth.

 

[chown33]

Given the technical problems with the depth, it would probably be a lot cheaper and more technically feasible to perform a high-resolution laser scan using remotely piloted submersibles.

3D laser scanners (lidar) have already made inroads in terrestrial archaeology. Robotic scanners have been sent into areas where humans can't fit, such as partially blocked underground tunnel systems. They've also been flown in aircraft, where their ability to "see through" vegetation lets them show land forms and reveal human-made structures.

After something's been scanned, the data can be used to reconstruct a replica at any scale one desires, of any part or section thereof. A life-size replica could be built for a museum, or a part could be isolated for research or simple entertainment.


Underwater lidar systems are currently being used at depths of "nearly 3 km" with cm resolution:
http://optics.org/news/8/3/26

I easily found that item just by googling: underwater lidar systems

Here's more on the lidar technology itself (terrestrial and underwater, in archaeology and other domains):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar

 

[cube]

Who wants to go see a replica?

 

[chown33]

Who wants to go see a replica?

Many people don't realize it, but museum displays of dinosaur skeletons are often replicas, typically hollow fiberglass or composite casts made from the originals. The real fossil bones (i.e. stone) are often too heavy to withstand being reassembled in their full-size anatomical placement, or they're preserved as research materials.

Next time you're at a museum displaying dinosaur skeletons, ask one of the guides, or quietly give a little flick of your finger against the displayed skeleton. If it doesn't sound like flicking a stone wall, it's not stone.

 

[Dubdrifter]

A brilliant idea, Chown 33 ...... accuracy of 1cm at depth is probably much better than a trained underwater excavator could map in those conditions ...... in a submersible!
More realistic data than you get from a Geophys scan ...... a few trips to salvage some of the contents and a few wood samples showing joint construction techniques ...... build the museum ..... set the 3D printer to knock up a 3D replica ..... they could have this excavation wrapped up and on display within a year!

....... but I can see museum curators having ‘hot sweat palpitations’ over your suggestions to discretely test which bits of their dinosaur skeletons are real by tapping the bones!

 

[v3rlon]

Many people don't realize it, but museum displays of dinosaur skeletons are often replicas, typically hollow fiberglass or composite casts made from the originals. The real fossil bones (i.e. stone) are often too heavy to withstand being reassembled in their full-size anatomical placement, or they're preserved as research materials.

Next time you're at a museum displaying dinosaur skeletons, ask one of the guides, or quietly give a little flick of your finger against the displayed skeleton. If it doesn't sound like flicking a stone wall, it's not stone.

Yeah, I went to the King Tut Exhibit in a small museum outside of Austin, where they remarked that the (actual) death mask alone was made of 24 pounds of gold. Not a guard in site.

They said that almost everything you see in a museum is a replica. The real King Tut exhibit is in Cairo, and practically never leaves the country. Dinosaur bones are studied by scientists, not put on display for kids to play with (or to come to life at night and play fetch).

 

[KlingonSpy]

Archaeological excavations in Santorini suggest the destruction of the Minoan civilisation there closely resembles the fabled legend that Homer and others described as the Atlantean culture.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrotiri_(Santorini)

.... and the movies are probably the last place you would go if you want an accurate picture of historical events!

What "Raise the Titanic" wasn't accurate?

 

[Tigger11]

Who wants to go see a replica?

Actually I often consider a replica more fun to see then the "real thing". The Pirate Museum in Bahamas is a good example of that, they have pieces from a recovered wreck behind glass and recovered cannon, but they also have about half of the ship redone you can walk through and see how they slept, how the cannons swiveled in the turrents, walk the top dec, etc, which gives you a much better feel for what living, working, dying on the ship was like. For the wreck we are talking about here. Would you rather see a wood ship sitting in a brine tank, or see pictures of it on the bottom and get to walk the full boat and see how the merchants who sailed the boat lived on board, and what life was like for them 2500 years ago? Personally I think the second is more interesting, and its much, much cheaper to do and very little of chance of failing since no new technology is needed you scan the 2KM deep ship, maybe send a rover into the ship to collect or at least picture the contents, all technically feasible and then you create the copy or multiple copies, one for the top deck and one for under the deck which allows everyone to see where the cargo was and how the crew lived under the deck. You could see how much work it was to row an oar, etc. None of that are you going to get spending millions to try and bring the ship up from 2KM down.
-Tig

 

[Dubdrifter]

I think serious people with a scholarly inquisitiveness need a certain amount of the original ship in a museum dedicated to this wonderful discovery - to justify travelling across the world to also enjoy the experience you are describing, that museums can do so well these days ..... bringing to life, immersing their audience in the full feel of what it was like to live in those times.

Reconstructed replicas, like the Loch Tay crannog .....
http://www.crannog.co.uk/
........give people a very real experience of what once poked above the water surface, but you can’t get the ‘full’ majesty of these discoveries by artificial reconstruction and 3D immersion alone ...... like the sanitised ‘Las Vegas experience’, it can never quite capture the reality of the European Grand Tour and the ‘majesty’ of the pyramids ..... It works for some, but most people appreciate a taste of the real thing.

Only a fraction of the people would travel to Sweden to see the Vasa ‘experience’ if none of the original was there. The more of the original you can present ..... the bigger the draw ..... if you can raise a whole ship in this condition ..... handed to you on a plate, clear to see ..... surely you wouldn’t pass up this opportunity?
It’s a huge challenge .... but so was landing a man on the moon ..... humanity loves these sorts of challenges .... it’s in our DNA!