When Elias Stadiatis descended into the indigo-blue water, he had a normal day of searching for sponges ahead of him. Weighed down in a copper diving suit, surrounded by a tangle of breathing tubes, Stadiatis eventually reached the seafloor. As he squinted into the dim, he took in a haunting scene: all around were the fuzzy outlines of human body parts. As he surfaced in a pool of bubbles, he frantically informed the captain he’d found a heap of rotting corpses.
It was the spring of 1900, and Stadiatis had accidentally discovered the Antikythera shipwreck – the remains of a Roman cargo vessel that had sunk more than two millennia earlier. It soon became clear that it was not teeming with cadavers, as it first seemed, but artworks – marble sculptures and bronze statues, seasoned by thousands of years among algae, sponges and fish.
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.
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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.
Read more: BBC
