The Demise of SMS Szent István
During WWI, the mighty warship from the Austrian-Hungarian navy was attacked at an unexpected moment. The brave crew of two Italian torpedo boats did not falter and the Szent István was struck twice with deadly force.
Wrecks & Archaeology
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Aircraft Wrecks of Gran Canaria
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Sabine Kerkau
Divers on wreck of the Douglas C-47. Photo by Sabine Kerkau.
For over a year, I had been looking forward to a very special expedition that was planned for May 2014. But as you know, life does not always go the way you plan. The expedition was postponed, and once again, I had to find an alternative, at relatively short notice.
Wreck Diving in Lithuania
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Sabine Kerkau
The BSHRP team recovered a bell marked with the name SS Marsdiep 1920 from a wreck later identified as the SS Edith Bosselman, Klaipėda, Lithuania. Photo by Sabine Kerkau.
It was pure coincidence that led my expedition team and me to Lithuania for the first time in September 2016. Our goal was to dive the battleship SMS Friedrich Carl. What we did not know before this first visit was that we would discover the “El Dorado” of pristine wrecks in Lithuania, which could keep us busy for many years.
SMS Friedrich Carl
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Vic Verlinden
The armoured cruiser Carl Friedrich was constructed in the year 1902 at the well-known shipyard of Blohm & Voss in Hamburg, Germany. The armoured cruiser had a length of 126m and was equipped with an impressive array of guns and torpedo launchers. She was the second ship of the Prinz Adalbert class when she was commissioned by the Imperial German Navy on 12 December 1903.
Californian Wreck
Images
Pascal Henaff
Illustration by Hervé Marsaud
Hardware covered with corynactis, which decorates the entire wreck of the Californian
The Californian was an American steamship built in 1900, which sank in the Gulf of Biscay, off the coast of France, in 1918, during a WWI convoy. Pascal Henaff has the story.
Awakening the Past: Reimagining Kavieng's Ghosts of the Machines
Images
Don Silcock
Photogrammetry image of the wreck of a Nakajima “Kate” B5N fighter-bomber in Kavieng, by Sean Twomey
There is a huge potential for wreck photogrammetry in Kavieng and the neighbouring large island of New Hanover in Papua New Guinea, for it is here that one can find several notable wrecks of WWII aircraft. Don Silcock shares his experience working with technical expert Sean Twomey in an initiative to capture photogrammetry imagery of the wrecks before they succumb to the ravages of time and eventually disappear.
Remains of a rare Elizabethan-era ship found in quarry
Workers at a quarry near Dungeness made the dramatic discovery of a rare Elizabethan-era shipwreck on the coast of Kent while dredging gravel for building materials out of a lake in April.
The location is now some 300 metres from the coast, but archaeologists believe that the site was once right on the coastline. The vessel could have been wrecked or abandoned on the former shoreline, and then gradually buried in sediment as time passed and the headland expanded.
Fossil bed in national forest in Nevada may have been breeding ground for ichthyosaurs
In the Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in Nevada, there is a fossil bed in which many ichthyosaurs (Shonisaurus popularis) have been found petrified in stone.
Over the years, there has been speculation that they had perished in a mass stranding incident or due to a nearby algal bloom. While these were possible, there had not been strong evidence to support these theories.
Steamship lost in 1875 off Washington coast located
The SS Pacific was on its way from Puget Sound and Victoria to San Francisco when it collided with a big sailing ship in the dark off Cape Flattery on November 4, 1875 and sank in less than an hour. The Pacific had an estimated 275 passengers and crew aboard of which only two survived, making the sinking the most deadly maritime disaster in Northwest history.
Nearly intact ancient shipwrecks found in the Baltic
The discoveries in the Baltic Sea are unprecedented and have revealed shipwrecks hundreds of years old. Two of them are with great certainty cargo vessels from the Netherlands, while the third and largest is supposed to be a Scandinavian vessel.
All three shipwrecks stand like ghost ships almost unscathed in total darkness on the seabed at a depth of approximately 150 meters and beyond the reach of modern fishing vessels.
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In order to obtain the best footage, two Swedish photogrammetry experts Ingemar Lundgren and Fredrik Skorg from the company Ocean Discovery took part in the expedition. An underwater robot equipped with an advanced camera brought thousands of images to the surface and reproduces with great precision a virtual image of the wrecks as they actually appear.
The pictures are so detailed that you get the feeling of being able to walk around a ship that sank hundreds of years ago.