Tuesday, 11 February 2025
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An interesting post has appeared on the Ulster University homepage regarding wreck exploration. It turns out that soon we may witness a change in the rules of the game and the technology used. It is well known that combing miles and miles of seas and oceans with sonar in search of sunken ships is a tedious, time-consuming and very expensive affair. As it turns out, the use of satellites orbiting the Earth and photographing its surface can help.
This is the subject of a paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science by Dr Rory Quinn and his colleagues at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and the Flemish Hydrographic Service. They describe a new technique for searching for sunken wrecks that uses remote sensing via satellites orbiting the Earth.
In his paper, Dr Rory Quinn explains that in many cases traditional search methods do not work. This is due to shallow depths, e.g. in the case of coastal waters, or low water transparency, which is an obstacle to the use of photometric LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging). The new method described by his team is based on data acquired by, for example, the Landsat-8 satellite. As Dr Quinn himself predicts, the results of their research should soon find application in the work of government agencies, oceanographers, archaeologists or biologists.
The search for and monitoring of sunken shipwrecks around the world is important for many reasons. If we are talking about wrecks from many centuries ago, we are of course talking about historical knowledge. Such finds are time capsules of sorts, often carrying information and answers that have been lost for centuries and today, thanks to the exploration and documentation of wrecks, we can learn about them anew.
Another, but extremely important reason why wrecks should be searched for is the impact they may have on the environment and our lives. Many of them sunk during warfare or storms contain huge amounts of substances which, if released into water (e.g. as a result of corrosion), may lead to huge ecological disasters and total degradation of local fauna and flora.
Wrecks, ocean acidification and dumping of waste are the three main sources of pollution of the marine environment. More than 70% of the World War I and World War II wrecks sunk in European waters are in a condition that can be considered alarming. The materials that make up the structure of wrecks are deteriorating year by year. Corroding in contact with salty seawater, at some point they will cease to be a barrier between dangerous cargo and the environment.
For researchers focused on the latter aspect, i.e. the development of fauna and flora, wrecks are a kind of centres of life. Whether we are talking about a wreck that sank in one of the… let’s call it “classic” ways, or a specially sunken vessel turned into an artificial reef, we can be sure of one thing – in a very short time new objects will be taken over by underwater inhabitants. Corals, mussels and everything else we can imagine will overgrow their shells, while dark corners will become a refuge for many species of fish and other creatures.
The North Atlantic Ocean is home to approximately 25% of the world’s potentially environmentally hazardous wrecks. It is estimated that their holds contain about 38% of the total amount of fuels carried by sunken vessels. A separate problem is also posed by those ships and vessels which were sunk during warfare with large cargoes of ammunition, also subject to corrosion and releasing dangerous pollutants into the environment. In the case of mercury, for example, the matter is all the more serious because it is a non-biodegradable substance that can contaminate the entire food chain.
Source: ulster.ac.uk
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