
World's oldest intact shipwreck discovered in Black Sea - the_duke
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/23/oldest-intact-shipwreck-thought-to-be-ancient-greek-discovered-at-bottom-of-black-sea
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omazurov
I wonder what happened to the previous oldest intact shipwreck discovered by
Robert Ballard in Black Sea:
[http://press.nationalgeographic.com/2003/01/16/black-seas-
ol...](http://press.nationalgeographic.com/2003/01/16/black-seas-oldest-
shipwreck-found-on-ballard-expedition/)

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koboll
Do researchers from disciplines like history and marine biology ever pool
their resources for missions like this, just to explore uncharted areas of the
ocean deep to discover what's down there? It seems like there's so much
opportunity across so many fields to discover new things by exploring the
oceans.

~~~
karavelov
Black Sea is dead below 100-150m due to lack of oxigen - there is no live
there, and this is the reason why we can find preserved recks from 2400 years
ago.

Edit: so there is no much interest from maritime biology.

~~~
close04
One more issue is that it's prohibitively expensive and very challenging
technically to explore the bottom of oceans and seas properly. Any exploration
needs _a lot_ of support from the surface, equipment that can stand a very
taxing environment (perhaps more so than in space), and the water covered
parts of the planet are _huge_.

Unless it's for oil very few bother surveying under those bodies of water.

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kieckerjan
The accompanying video shows divers inspecting a wreck, but I take it this is
not the wreck from the article: this lies at over a mile deep.

~~~
dotancohen
The photo of the wreck from the article and the wreck in the video are very
different. The video has nothing to do with the latest find.

Note also that one of the divers in the video is silting badly towards the
end. I don't think that those are professional archeologist divers in the
video.

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wepple
It’s weird, they appear to be tec divers, yet you’re right.. the photographer
(two off-camera strobes) goes ahead and ruins viz with a couple of kicks?

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Symmetry
2400 years ago? That pretty much coincides with the Late Bronze Age Collapse,
a time period we have very fragmentary textual evidence from. This could be a
very exciting find.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse)

~~~
twic
1200-1150 BC is 3168-3218 years ago, not 2400 years ago.

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albertgoeswoof
How did they find this? It’s over 1 mile below the surface, so was this some
kind of submarine / automated rover or a scan from the surface?

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londons_explore
Shipwrecks usually show up well on sonar scans. Lots of the worlds oceans have
been scanned looking for good hiding places for submarines, and looking for
enemy submarines hiding in said places.

Not many of those scans are public, but sometimes researchers are tipped off
where to look for wrecks.

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noncoml
Many believe the real reason behind the Trojan War was the control of the
Bosphorus Strait that ships like this had to cross to reach the Black Sea from
Greece.

~~~
consp
To add: No

It was the Dardanelles (the Bosphorus is quite far off, though just as
important).

You can (as usual) read a bit and find some starting articles on the wikipedia
page:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dardanelles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dardanelles)

~~~
ashelmire
The most interesting thing I learned from that wiki hole you just sent me
down: Xerxes apparently threw irons at, whipped, branded, and had his soldiers
shout at the Dardanelles. That must have been quite a show.

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readitone
Not to brag about it, but those things get me a little annoyed. Not a single
word that this is found near Bulgaria territory, if i am not mistaken. If
something is found near Murica or Greatest Britain of all, we will be reading
a different titles.:)

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ChrisGranger
"The five metre (75ft) vessel..."

Perhaps fifteen feet?

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judgardner
Seems they corrected pretty quickly, but yeah funny.

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de_watcher
At this point these ft and weird date formats are more like just annoying...

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vincebowdren
Go on, I'll bite. Which date format in the article is weird?

