There's so much sediment you just can't see everything." "If a diver was to go down and swim the length of the wreck - they'd never get the kind of images that we would get because of the scale of these things. There's no light down there, so you cannot see much at all," Roberts said. "A lot of these wrecks are in deep water.
The technology which the ship uses has the potential to be as effective for marine archaeologists as the use of aerial photography by archaeologists on land, according to the release. It's the ship that underpins everything." It "really does allow us to go out for up to 10 days at a time and go dot-to-dot between the vessels," Roberts said. Prince Madog was commissioned by Bangor University and is managed and operated by offshore service provider O.S. McCartney described the multibeam sonar technique as "a 'game-changer' for marine archaeology," allowing historians to use the data it provides to fill gaps in their understanding. Many of the newly identified wrecks, including the Mesaba, had been wrongly identified in the past, researchers said. The wrecks were scanned and cross-referenced against the UK Hydrographic Office's database of wrecks and other sources. In total, 273 shipwrecks were found by the Prince Madog sprawled in 7,500 square miles of the Irish Sea - an area roughly the size of Slovenia. Roberts said the cost of discovering and identifying each wreck was between £800 ($855) and £1,000 ($1,070). We can connect this back to the historical information without costly physical interaction with each site," McCartney added in the release. The (purpose-built research vessel) Prince Madog's unique sonar capabilities has enabled us to develop a relatively low-cost means of examining the wrecks. "Previously we would be able to dive to a few sites a year to visually identify wrecks. The team of researchers began plumbing down deeper into unsolved mysteries to "tease out their stories." "McCartney was really interested in applying that technology to shipwrecks to identify them," Roberts said. "We knew there were lots of shipwrecks in our backyard in the Irish Sea," Roberts told CNN on Wednesday, adding they could provide "useful insights into what happens when things go onto the seabed."īut it was only when Roberts began working with Innes McCartney, a maritime archaeologist and research fellow at Bangor University, that the "pieces of the jigsaw" began to fit together. Shipwrecks proved to be a valuable source of information in this field. Michael Roberts, a maritime geoscientist at Bangor University in Wales, led the sonar surveys at the university's School of Ocean Sciences.įor several years, he's been working with the marine renewable energy sector to study the effect of the ocean on energy-generating infrastructure. This was the first time that the researchers were able to locate and positively identify the wreck, according to a news statement. The offshore surveying tool uses sound waves to enable seabed mapping in such detail that the superstructure can be revealed on sonar images, allowing researchers at Bangor University and Bournemouth University in the UK to positively identify the shipwreck in the Irish Sea. Its exact location was unknown for more than a century, but scientists have now found the wreck of the Mesaba by using multibeam sonar. Twenty people, including the ship's commander, died. The Mesaba continued as a merchant ship until it was torpedoed by a German submarine while in convoy in 1918. More than 1,500 people died in what remains the world's most infamous shipwreck. Later that night, the Titanic hit the iceberg and sank. The message was received by the Titanic - which was advertised as unsinkable - but did not reach the main control center of the vessel. The British merchant steamship SS Mesaba sent a warning radio message to the Titanic on Apwhile crossing the Atlantic. The wreck of a ship that tried to warn the RMS Titanic of the iceberg that sank it on its maiden voyage has been found at the bottom of the Irish Sea.
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