8 ms·

How many shipwrecks are there in the world's oceans?

135 points by Thevet 3y ago

invalidname 3y ago
> 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.
- 4rt 3y ago
  That stood out to me too.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- abhibeckert 3y ago
  That list would be nowhere near complete. For example my brother lost a vessel in a hurricane - he was bunkered down on the mainland and it was gone after the storm - we assume the storm surge lifted the anchor off the seafloor and it floated to who knows where and wrecked. It wasn't insured, so wasn't reported. I suppose it's possible someone stole it, but I can't imagine anyone would be brave/stupid enough to do that during a hurricane. Maybe someone somewhere in the world got lucky enough to see a drifting abandoned vessel and claimed it... but that's pretty unlikely.
  - mdaniel 3y ago
    > It wasn't insured, so wasn't reported Forgive me if this is a dumb question, as I'm not a sailor, but wouldn't one want to report it as at least "missing" since it does have registration? I could see that having at least 2 benefits: if spotted, they can return it, and if involved in something nefarious your brother would have a solid alibi of why it would be in someone else's hands
    - WirelessGigabit 3y ago
      For some reason I'm now thinking of a drive-by shooting in a sailboat. But suddenly the wind drops, and they can't speed away.
reillyse 3y ago
All of the ships ever built minus all of the ships ever repurposed/recycled minus all of the boats that inexplicably end up sitting on a trailer in a desert somewhere. So pretty much all of the ships ever built.
- jaredhallen 3y ago
  Do you suppose there were triremes just beached out in the Egyptian desert back then, too?
  - hef19898 3y ago
    If wrecking was cheaper there and environmental regulations laxer than in Rome, yes!
ggm 3y ago
I was struck by how many boats were found at the bottom of the black sea. It's deep: 2000m deep at some point(s). Deep, cold, de-oxygenated water. It preserves some things. Its northern shores also represent the limit of the Roman Empire, so are the marginal space where trading with other cultures probably happened. Since so much of history is related to trade, the amount of pre-, Roman and post-Roman stuff down there is fascinating, and informative. Boats are wonderful for shipping goods which are too bulky or heavy to fit on pack horses (or camels) -And economically sailing is probably the way to get goods to and from buyer and seller. Not that the silk road didn't work, but if you could stop having to hassle with recalcitrant camels and move to a boat, you could ship goods to Byzantium and it's successor states on the shores of the Black sea very easily. I wonder how many pre-coal wrecks on the atlantic run are now covered in the trail of ash out of the coal era boats plying the same trade.
- npunt 3y ago
  Makes me wonder if there may be newer shipwrecks atop older shipwrecks, and we may miss these older interesting finds because the newer ships atop them are considered not worth exploring. Extremely unlikely in the vast ocean but I imagine some very high-traffic areas like near black sea ports or common areas like rock formations this may have happened with some regularity.
  - ponector 3y ago
    There are almost every year accidents with small old bulker ships (dead weight of 3000-5000 tons) in Black sea. I'm sure their remains stay at the bottom for future generations
    - Etrnl_President 3y ago
      https://www.imcbrokers.com/marine-salvage-companies-around-the-world/ https://www.imcbrokers.com/marine-salvage-companies-around-t...
      - biztos 3y ago
forgingahead 3y ago
Pretty incredible. We really take for granted the modern connectivity and access of goods and people compared to what human beings had to do for most of history. Tangentially related: Clive Cussler[0] books are good fun if you're looking for a fiction series about shipwrecks and other nautical adventures. [0]https://www.amazon.com/stores/Clive-Cussler/author/B000APJ4L6 https://www.amazon.com/stores/Clive-Cussler/author/B000APJ4L...
- staplers 3y ago
  Atlantis Found is an underrated classic. Indiana Jones esque.
pugworthy 3y ago
I grew up on the Oregon coast, and there are some interesting records and histories of Japanese ships washing up on the western shores of the Pacific. Pacific currents will carry all kinds of things from Japan to the coast, including according to some stories, Japanese ships gone adrift in the 1600's. I can certainly attest to finding glass fishing floats on the coast as a child, and finding what clearly was a beam from a more traditional Japanese house on the Oregon coast some years after the 2011 Japanese earthquake. My point being I suppose that you can find shipwrecks of surprising origin in places you don't expect.
runjake 3y ago
Answer: Between 250,000 and 3 million.
steve_adams_86 3y ago
Someone I know is a hydrographer who charts our local waters and it’s incredible to see how many wrecks they pick up in their multi beam data. Some are very clearly ships, others less obviously; you kind of develop a knack for picking that signal out of the noise. Apart from ships, there are also the odd aircrafts here and there. Those are far less common from what I’ve seen. I’d estimate the bays around our city have several dozen wrecks combined. The main harbour has had some removed over the years, but there are around a dozen fairly small and boring wrecks and 3 which recreational divers frequently check out. A little further out and you can actually find an entire barge that lit on fire and sank with like 100 crushed cars on it. So weird. Maybe not all that shocking though, considering one lit on fire with a pile of cars on it just 5 years ago (though it didn’t sink). It’s a real mess down there.
- 13of40 3y ago
  Not sure how many are still there, since I read that the State of Washington had a campaign about cleaning up derelicts a few years back, but the canals just north of where US Route 2 crosses the Snohomish river by Everett used to have a ton of derelict and sunken boats. I think there are some back-alley marine works up the canal to the east that might be the source of it. I skipped work one day several years ago and took my little boat up that canal to look at a half sunken wooden tugboat (that doesn't seem to be there anymore) and actually saw a derelict motorboat hull, upside down, with its inboard motor removed, just floating down toward the sea. The cops were there at the dock when I landed, trying to figure out if it had flipped in an accident or something.
- martin_a 3y ago
  Is there an "easy" way to do this mapping with local lakes and ponds? Without disturbing/hurting fish and other wildlife?
  - LeifCarrotson 3y ago
    Not really, the "easy" way is to hook up an enormously expensive multi-beam sonar to a surface vessel. A more difficult but inexpensive way to start would be to take a single-channel Ping2 transducer: https://bluerobotics.com/store/sensors-sonars-cameras/sonar/ping-sonar-r2-rp/ https://bluerobotics.com/store/sensors-sonars-cameras/sonar/... and hook it up to a pan/tilt system and datalogger. Low-power sonar shouldn't hurt fish. At only 0.2W, even with a 10ms pulse width increasing the instantaneous power output to 20W, that ultrasound pulse is probably not even perceptible to fish. Lots of studies have shown that "fish finders" are not perceptible to fish, and humans typically can't hear them either. On the other hand, military sonar can have power levels of many kilowatts and sound pressure levels that are literally off the charts, generating forces of 235 dB that cannot be replicated in air at atmospheric pressure. These are known to kill whales, dolphins, and other wildlife! They are even powerful enough to kill or maim humans who happen to be swimming too close to the ship or submarine; navies will use this to deter/repel boarders when docked in potentially hostile locations.
hyperman1 3y ago
Flanders north sea ship wreck database: https://wrakkendatabank.afdelingkust.be/ https://wrakkendatabank.afdelingkust.be/ 300+ wrecks in a tiny part of one of the busiest seas in the world. There exists a bigger database of 2000+ wrecks, marked with 1) are there dead people i.e. is it a grave. 2) Are there live or inactive munitions? 3) Are there nasty chemicals. I don't know if they put it online already. Don't be an idiot and try to dive in there, BTW, these things are dangerous.
- pyuser583 3y ago
  I saw a database of historical Roman wrecks. Most of the locations were kept secret. Here: http://oxrep.classics.ox.ac.uk/databases/shipwrecks_database/ http://oxrep.classics.ox.ac.uk/databases/shipwrecks_database... Does the DB you mentioned include these?
  - hyperman1 3y ago
    I don't know. But most North Sea wrecks are from both world wars, and the sea itself is radared and scanned to death by just about everyone. I don't think you can keep anything down there a secret. It's also busy. Divers have to attach visible labels to their experiments to make sure other divers don't disturb or steal them.
    - lostlogin 3y ago
      > I don't know. But most North Sea wrecks are from both world wars, and the sea itself is radared and scanned to death by just about everyone. I don't think you can keep anything down there a secret. I’m not so sure, look what happened to the pipeline in the Baltic. That said, maybe it’s well know what happened there.
      - hyperman1 3y ago
        If you look at the Baltic, I presume (But never worked there, this is a guess) * We know what ships went near the pipeline. AIS probably has it, and in that case radar would show a ship without AIS. * We know where the pipeline is. * We don't know that something tiny like a bomb was attached. We don't know which of the passing ships did it. Same for the north sea: We know what ship/windmill/.. exists on the surface and on the floor. But I know of some divers attaching an experiment to a war ship wreck, coming back a few months later for the results, and they notice someone stole one of the ship's cannons (and these are huge and heavy). They were surprised this happened because of the sheer size of the thing, but minor theft and vandalism underwater is an everyday occurence for them.
jstarfish 3y ago
I could only read the beginning of the article so maybe it was mentioned, but a tangential cause: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_ship_(insurance) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_ship_(insurance)
- thriftwy 3y ago
  I wonder whose money did they embezzle, since insurance companies sure could arrange a check of the condition of ship before insuring it.
  - wasimanitoba 3y ago
    It says a new coat of paint over a rotting ship would suffice in those days.
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      I'm not sure how it is a good deal for the insurer who will have to pay for loss of craft. It's only a good deal if somebody else ends up footing these bills. I don't believe that England's insurers were so stupid that they would bear such losses for decades without doing something about these.
      - wasimanitoba 3y ago
        you are correct in that the Wikipedia page specifically states that legislative change came after about three decades of this (and suggests it was at the behest of insurers): > They were generally eliminated in the 1870s with the success of reforms championed by British MP Samuel Plimsoll. [...] Plimsoll stated in the British Parliament, "The Secretary of Lloyd's [Insurance] tells a friend of mine that he does not know a single ship which has been broken up voluntarily by the owners in the course of 30 years on account of its being worn out".[5]
        thriftwy 3y ago
        I don't understand what prevented insurers from not insuring these ships? Were they obliged to insure everything thrown at them?
ogou 3y ago
Engineers (or anybody involved in a botched product launch) may be interested in the story of the Vasa. It was a Swedish warship launched in 1627. At the time it was the most powerful warship in the world. It took many years to build at a shipyard in Stockholm within sight of the King's palace. The ship was launched at a public ceremony and made it 1300m out into the harbor. To fire a celebratory salute, its gunports were open. A strong wind came and tilted it over, letting water rush in through the gunports. It sank in minutes. The cause was poor design and a lack of appropriate ballast, rushed into production despite flaws. It sat at the bottom of the harbor for 300 years, perfectly preserved. In the 1970s, the Swedes decided to recover the ship by refloating it. It was a huge effort, but it worked. It has been completely restored and sits in a multi-story museum built around it. I saw it last month and was awestruck by the size and craftmanship. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)
- moneywoes 3y ago
  What were the consequences for the engineers
  - StevenRayOrr 3y ago
    > An inquiry was organized by the Swedish Privy Council to find those responsible for the disaster, but in the end no one was punished.[1] [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)
- fsloth 3y ago
  As a funny anecdote engineering students placed a modern miniature statue on the ships deck as a prank just before it was raised ( in Finnish but translation tools help https://fi.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa-jäynä https://fi.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa-jäynä )
  - tsm 3y ago
    Google Translate link: https://fi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Vasa-j%C3%A4yn%C3%A4?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://fi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Vasa-j%C3%A4y... for "ice", read "prank"
BlakeSimpson 3y ago
"It's now possible to build up a picture of the ocean floor even in the deepest water " With this statement, would it allow them to scan and have a clear picture of things like said shipwrecks? Or is it more geographical?

135 points by Thevet 3y ago

> 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.

4rt 3y ago
That stood out to me too.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
abhibeckert 3y ago
That list would be nowhere near complete. For example my brother lost a vessel in a hurricane - he was bunkered down on the mainland and it was gone after the storm - we assume the storm surge lifted the anchor off the seafloor and it floated to who knows where and wrecked. It wasn't insured, so wasn't reported. I suppose it's possible someone stole it, but I can't imagine anyone would be brave/stupid enough to do that during a hurricane. Maybe someone somewhere in the world got lucky enough to see a drifting abandoned vessel and claimed it... but that's pretty unlikely.
- mdaniel 3y ago
  > It wasn't insured, so wasn't reported Forgive me if this is a dumb question, as I'm not a sailor, but wouldn't one want to report it as at least "missing" since it does have registration? I could see that having at least 2 benefits: if spotted, they can return it, and if involved in something nefarious your brother would have a solid alibi of why it would be in someone else's hands
  - WirelessGigabit 3y ago
    For some reason I'm now thinking of a drive-by shooting in a sailboat. But suddenly the wind drops, and they can't speed away.

reillyse 3y ago

All of the ships ever built minus all of the ships ever repurposed/recycled minus all of the boats that inexplicably end up sitting on a trailer in a desert somewhere. So pretty much all of the ships ever built.

jaredhallen 3y ago
Do you suppose there were triremes just beached out in the Egyptian desert back then, too?
- hef19898 3y ago
  If wrecking was cheaper there and environmental regulations laxer than in Rome, yes!

ggm 3y ago

I was struck by how many boats were found at the bottom of the black sea. It's deep: 2000m deep at some point(s). Deep, cold, de-oxygenated water. It preserves some things. Its northern shores also represent the limit of the Roman Empire, so are the marginal space where trading with other cultures probably happened. Since so much of history is related to trade, the amount of pre-, Roman and post-Roman stuff down there is fascinating, and informative. Boats are wonderful for shipping goods which are too bulky or heavy to fit on pack horses (or camels) -And economically sailing is probably the way to get goods to and from buyer and seller. Not that the silk road didn't work, but if you could stop having to hassle with recalcitrant camels and move to a boat, you could ship goods to Byzantium and it's successor states on the shores of the Black sea very easily. I wonder how many pre-coal wrecks on the atlantic run are now covered in the trail of ash out of the coal era boats plying the same trade.

npunt 3y ago
Makes me wonder if there may be newer shipwrecks atop older shipwrecks, and we may miss these older interesting finds because the newer ships atop them are considered not worth exploring. Extremely unlikely in the vast ocean but I imagine some very high-traffic areas like near black sea ports or common areas like rock formations this may have happened with some regularity.
- ponector 3y ago
  There are almost every year accidents with small old bulker ships (dead weight of 3000-5000 tons) in Black sea. I'm sure their remains stay at the bottom for future generations
  - Etrnl_President 3y ago
    https://www.imcbrokers.com/marine-salvage-companies-around-the-world/ https://www.imcbrokers.com/marine-salvage-companies-around-t...
    - biztos 3y ago

forgingahead 3y ago

Pretty incredible. We really take for granted the modern connectivity and access of goods and people compared to what human beings had to do for most of history. Tangentially related: Clive Cussler[0] books are good fun if you're looking for a fiction series about shipwrecks and other nautical adventures. [0]https://www.amazon.com/stores/Clive-Cussler/author/B000APJ4L6 https://www.amazon.com/stores/Clive-Cussler/author/B000APJ4L...

staplers 3y ago
Atlantis Found is an underrated classic. Indiana Jones esque.

pugworthy 3y ago

I grew up on the Oregon coast, and there are some interesting records and histories of Japanese ships washing up on the western shores of the Pacific. Pacific currents will carry all kinds of things from Japan to the coast, including according to some stories, Japanese ships gone adrift in the 1600's. I can certainly attest to finding glass fishing floats on the coast as a child, and finding what clearly was a beam from a more traditional Japanese house on the Oregon coast some years after the 2011 Japanese earthquake. My point being I suppose that you can find shipwrecks of surprising origin in places you don't expect.

runjake 3y ago

Answer: Between 250,000 and 3 million.

steve_adams_86 3y ago

Someone I know is a hydrographer who charts our local waters and it’s incredible to see how many wrecks they pick up in their multi beam data. Some are very clearly ships, others less obviously; you kind of develop a knack for picking that signal out of the noise. Apart from ships, there are also the odd aircrafts here and there. Those are far less common from what I’ve seen. I’d estimate the bays around our city have several dozen wrecks combined. The main harbour has had some removed over the years, but there are around a dozen fairly small and boring wrecks and 3 which recreational divers frequently check out. A little further out and you can actually find an entire barge that lit on fire and sank with like 100 crushed cars on it. So weird. Maybe not all that shocking though, considering one lit on fire with a pile of cars on it just 5 years ago (though it didn’t sink). It’s a real mess down there.

13of40 3y ago
Not sure how many are still there, since I read that the State of Washington had a campaign about cleaning up derelicts a few years back, but the canals just north of where US Route 2 crosses the Snohomish river by Everett used to have a ton of derelict and sunken boats. I think there are some back-alley marine works up the canal to the east that might be the source of it. I skipped work one day several years ago and took my little boat up that canal to look at a half sunken wooden tugboat (that doesn't seem to be there anymore) and actually saw a derelict motorboat hull, upside down, with its inboard motor removed, just floating down toward the sea. The cops were there at the dock when I landed, trying to figure out if it had flipped in an accident or something.
martin_a 3y ago
Is there an "easy" way to do this mapping with local lakes and ponds? Without disturbing/hurting fish and other wildlife?
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  Not really, the "easy" way is to hook up an enormously expensive multi-beam sonar to a surface vessel. A more difficult but inexpensive way to start would be to take a single-channel Ping2 transducer: https://bluerobotics.com/store/sensors-sonars-cameras/sonar/ping-sonar-r2-rp/ https://bluerobotics.com/store/sensors-sonars-cameras/sonar/... and hook it up to a pan/tilt system and datalogger. Low-power sonar shouldn't hurt fish. At only 0.2W, even with a 10ms pulse width increasing the instantaneous power output to 20W, that ultrasound pulse is probably not even perceptible to fish. Lots of studies have shown that "fish finders" are not perceptible to fish, and humans typically can't hear them either. On the other hand, military sonar can have power levels of many kilowatts and sound pressure levels that are literally off the charts, generating forces of 235 dB that cannot be replicated in air at atmospheric pressure. These are known to kill whales, dolphins, and other wildlife! They are even powerful enough to kill or maim humans who happen to be swimming too close to the ship or submarine; navies will use this to deter/repel boarders when docked in potentially hostile locations.

hyperman1 3y ago

Flanders north sea ship wreck database: https://wrakkendatabank.afdelingkust.be/ https://wrakkendatabank.afdelingkust.be/ 300+ wrecks in a tiny part of one of the busiest seas in the world. There exists a bigger database of 2000+ wrecks, marked with 1) are there dead people i.e. is it a grave. 2) Are there live or inactive munitions? 3) Are there nasty chemicals. I don't know if they put it online already. Don't be an idiot and try to dive in there, BTW, these things are dangerous.

pyuser583 3y ago
I saw a database of historical Roman wrecks. Most of the locations were kept secret. Here: http://oxrep.classics.ox.ac.uk/databases/shipwrecks_database/ http://oxrep.classics.ox.ac.uk/databases/shipwrecks_database... Does the DB you mentioned include these?
- hyperman1 3y ago
  I don't know. But most North Sea wrecks are from both world wars, and the sea itself is radared and scanned to death by just about everyone. I don't think you can keep anything down there a secret. It's also busy. Divers have to attach visible labels to their experiments to make sure other divers don't disturb or steal them.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    > I don't know. But most North Sea wrecks are from both world wars, and the sea itself is radared and scanned to death by just about everyone. I don't think you can keep anything down there a secret. I’m not so sure, look what happened to the pipeline in the Baltic. That said, maybe it’s well know what happened there.
    - hyperman1 3y ago
      If you look at the Baltic, I presume (But never worked there, this is a guess) * We know what ships went near the pipeline. AIS probably has it, and in that case radar would show a ship without AIS. * We know where the pipeline is. * We don't know that something tiny like a bomb was attached. We don't know which of the passing ships did it. Same for the north sea: We know what ship/windmill/.. exists on the surface and on the floor. But I know of some divers attaching an experiment to a war ship wreck, coming back a few months later for the results, and they notice someone stole one of the ship's cannons (and these are huge and heavy). They were surprised this happened because of the sheer size of the thing, but minor theft and vandalism underwater is an everyday occurence for them.

jstarfish 3y ago

I could only read the beginning of the article so maybe it was mentioned, but a tangential cause: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_ship_(insurance) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_ship_(insurance)

thriftwy 3y ago
I wonder whose money did they embezzle, since insurance companies sure could arrange a check of the condition of ship before insuring it.
- wasimanitoba 3y ago
  It says a new coat of paint over a rotting ship would suffice in those days.
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    I'm not sure how it is a good deal for the insurer who will have to pay for loss of craft. It's only a good deal if somebody else ends up footing these bills. I don't believe that England's insurers were so stupid that they would bear such losses for decades without doing something about these.
    - wasimanitoba 3y ago
      you are correct in that the Wikipedia page specifically states that legislative change came after about three decades of this (and suggests it was at the behest of insurers): > They were generally eliminated in the 1870s with the success of reforms championed by British MP Samuel Plimsoll. [...] Plimsoll stated in the British Parliament, "The Secretary of Lloyd's [Insurance] tells a friend of mine that he does not know a single ship which has been broken up voluntarily by the owners in the course of 30 years on account of its being worn out".[5]
      - thriftwy 3y ago
        I don't understand what prevented insurers from not insuring these ships? Were they obliged to insure everything thrown at them?

ogou 3y ago

Engineers (or anybody involved in a botched product launch) may be interested in the story of the Vasa. It was a Swedish warship launched in 1627. At the time it was the most powerful warship in the world. It took many years to build at a shipyard in Stockholm within sight of the King's palace. The ship was launched at a public ceremony and made it 1300m out into the harbor. To fire a celebratory salute, its gunports were open. A strong wind came and tilted it over, letting water rush in through the gunports. It sank in minutes. The cause was poor design and a lack of appropriate ballast, rushed into production despite flaws. It sat at the bottom of the harbor for 300 years, perfectly preserved. In the 1970s, the Swedes decided to recover the ship by refloating it. It was a huge effort, but it worked. It has been completely restored and sits in a multi-story museum built around it. I saw it last month and was awestruck by the size and craftmanship. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)

moneywoes 3y ago
What were the consequences for the engineers
- StevenRayOrr 3y ago
  > An inquiry was organized by the Swedish Privy Council to find those responsible for the disaster, but in the end no one was punished.[1] [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)
fsloth 3y ago
As a funny anecdote engineering students placed a modern miniature statue on the ships deck as a prank just before it was raised ( in Finnish but translation tools help https://fi.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa-jäynä https://fi.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa-jäynä )
- tsm 3y ago
  Google Translate link: https://fi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Vasa-j%C3%A4yn%C3%A4?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://fi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Vasa-j%C3%A4y... for "ice", read "prank"

BlakeSimpson 3y ago

"It's now possible to build up a picture of the ocean floor even in the deepest water " With this statement, would it allow them to scan and have a clear picture of things like said shipwrecks? Or is it more geographical?