Delving deeper: finding histories buried at sea. From the article:

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. But there are plenty of submerged wonders still waiting to be discovered.

Take the recent Unesco expedition to Skerki Bank, a particularly treacherous shallow reef that links the eastern and western Mediterranean. 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. 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. 

And 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….

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. 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….

In fact, it’s thought the shipwrecks that have been documented only represent a small fraction of the total. According to an analysis by Unesco, there are over three million resting undiscovered in the world’s oceans….

In the past, many shipwrecks were found in relatively shallow waters, sometimes by accident, as fishermen, scientists or treasure-hunters explored the seabed around the world’s coastlines. But with access to sophisticated submersibles, modern camera equipment and new sonar technologies, finding deeper shipwrecks has never been so easy.

It’s now possible to build up a picture of the ocean floor even in the deepest water – in 2019, researchers discovered the resting place of the destroyer USS Johnston 6km (3.7 miles) deep in the Philippine Trench…. Then earlier this year, scientists built a digital twin of the Titanic in three dimensions, based on surveys of the wreck on the Atlantic Ocean floor.

As a result, the oceans are giving up their secrets at an unprecedented rate. Just as the use of sonar and GPS tracking has transformed fishing – allowing whole shoals of once-elusive tuna to be identified in the open ocean – anyone can now use these same technologies to find shipwrecks in locations never previously suspected.

For related articles on discoveries at sea, see here and here.