Less than 1 percent of the world's shipwrecks have been explored

US AWOIS database (extract)

From Popular Mechanics by Jay Bennett

A rough estimate puts more than three million shipwrecks on the ocean floor.

This number represents ships throughout the entirety of human history, from 10,000-year-old dugout canoes preserved in the muck to 21st century wrecks that you might have read about in the news.

There are so many shipwrecks, in fact, that a search operation for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has discovered two by accident.

The Battle of the Atlantic alone, which spanned nearly six years during World War II, claimed over 3,500 merchant vessels, 175 warships, and 783 submarines.

Particularly interesting are the cargo ships that literally contain treasure, such as Spanish galleons that transported gold and jewels across the Atlantic.

The Uluburun shipwreck off the coast of southwestern Turkey is roughly 3,300 years old, and that Late Bronze Age vessel contained gold, silver, jewels, copper and tin ingots, tools, swords and other weapons, and much more trade cargo—all of it hauled up over the course of 10 years and 22,413 dives.

But most wrecks don't receive that kind of attention.

In fact, less than 10 percent of the shipwrecks that we we've located—which account for just 10 percent of all shipwrecks in the world—have been surveyed or visited by divers.

Fishing trawlers snag on sunken ships, sonar readings pick them up, historical records tell us where they should be, harbor dredging operations uncover wrecks that have long been lost below the seafloor—but there simply isn't enough time and money to explore the vast majority of them.

The Sweepstakes was built in 1867 as a two-masted schooner in Burlington, Ontario by John Simpson.
The ship's length is 36.3m (119ft) and lays just below the surface in Big Tub harbor with a maximum depth of 7m (20ft).
The Sweepstakes was damaged off Cove Island, then towed to Big Tub harbor where she sank in 1885.
At times, the shipwreck will sit well below the surface of Lake Huron and then when the lake becomes shallower, sections of the Sweepstakes rise up out of the water making parts clearly visible.
Throughout Fathom Five National Marine Park, there are 22 shipwrecks and many people come here to snorkel and scuba dive in these pristine waters.

Daunting Task

James Delgado, the Director of Maritime Heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), says that there are an estimated 4,300 shipwrecks within NOAA's 14 National Marine Sanctuaries.

Of these, 432 have been dived on and surveyed.

And these are shipwrecks within a mapped area set aside for preservation.

"There are laws and regulations directing NOAA to find what lies in those waters and assess it," Delgado said in an email.

Similar to other marine preservation organizations around the world, NOAA is not only devoted to discovering what the ships are, but also how their presence might affect the ecology of the marine environments they lie within.

Outside of marine sanctuaries, there isn't as much of an incentive.

Most shipwrecks are documented for a much simpler reason: to avoid collisions or other incidents. NOAA's Office of Coast Survey maintains a database of about 20,000 ships that is available to the public, primarily for the benefit of navigators and researchers.

The information for that database comes from two organizations within NOAA, the Electronic Navigational Charts (ENC) and the Automated Wrecks and Obstructions Information System (AWOIS).

Still, it's difficult to pinpoint exactly where a shipwreck is on the ocean floor.

The database lists some limitations, including that it "contains wreck features from two different sources that were created for different purposes, and there is not a perfect match of features from either source. The same wreck may be found in both the ENC wrecks and AWOIS wrecks layers, although the positions may not necessarily agree."

Riches Under the Sea

Still, there is an estimated $60 billion in sunken treasure around the world, just waiting at the bottom of the ocean.

And that doesn't include the historical and cultural value of excavating shipwreck sites.

So why don't we explore more of them?

For one thing, it's hard to know what's worth the time.

Diving operations can cost millions of dollars, and before we go down there, we have no idea what the ship is, what it was carrying, and what condition the cargo is in. In some cases, we are not even 100 percent sure that the identified object is a ship at all.

"Not many people follow up on a target to determine if it is a wreck, and if so what type it is, and then if possible, which ship it is," says Delgado.

It is possible, however, that the situation will improve.

As Delgado points out, 90 to 95 percent of the sea floor itself remains unexplored.

There are a number of efforts to change that, such as the Ocean Discovery XPrize that is offering $7 million in prize money for private teams that build an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) and create a bathymetric map (like a topographic map, but of the sea floor).

The Schmidt Ocean Institute, founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, maintains a 272-foot vessel outfitted with modern oceanographic equipment that scientists can apply to use for various research expeditions. 

The good news, for shipwrecks explorers at least, is that the majority of shipwrecks are actually near the coast, with a large percentage of incidents occurring in and around the entryways to ports and harbors.

"Some harbors are tough to enter, like Oregon's Columbia River Bar, or leave, like San Francisco's Golden Gate and Bar, due to shifting winds, shifting sands, fog, storms, or strong tides," says Delgado.

"But also for the same reason that most auto accidents seem to happen within a mile of home, and there are many accidents coming in and out of parking lots, people seem to be less cautious or more aggressive."

With most shipwrecks so close to the shore, and multiple examples of wealthy patrons sponsoring exploration and research expeditions, we could see many of these unexplored shipwrecks investigated in the coming years.

But even with advancing AUV technologies and efforts to map more of the ocean floor, many shipwrecks are likely to remain unexplored until they are buried below the sands or decay beyond the point of recognition.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Canada finds British vessel that vanished on doomed North-West Passage expedition in 1840s /  Could this shipwreck be Christopher Columbus' Santa Maria? / Lost treasures reclaimed from 2,000-year-old Antikythera shipwreck / Historic shipwreck to be freeze-dried & rebuilt / Could shipwrecks lead the World to war? / Explore a shipwreck LIVE: Underwater project lets you watch in real-time as scientists navigate a sunken warship / Historic shipwreck to be freeze-dried & rebuilt /

Santiano with La Recouvrance

Two Miles deep trailer

Syndicated cartoonist Jim Toomey is best known for his daily comic strip “Sherman’s Lagoon,” which explores themes ranging from pop culture to ocean conservation through the eyes of a cast of sea creatures living in an imaginary lagoon.

In June of 2014, Jim was invited by the Duke University Marine Lab to be a “cartoonist-in-residence” aboard the famed deep submersible vehicle Alvin.

“Two Miles Deep” is an account of his dive to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

In this 27-minute film, we discover, from the perspective of a cartoonist, through video and animation, that the deep ocean is a world full of beauty and complexity.

Cape Horn discovered 400 years ago

Cabo de Hornos with the GeoGarage platform (SHN Argentina chart)

From Maritime Executive by Niek Boot

On January 29 2016, it is exactly 400 years ago that a Dutch merchant ship, the Eendracht, sailed by Cape Horn, the southern-most point of South America.
When Fernando Magallanes discovered and sailed the Strait of Magellan in 1520 it was still assumed that Tierra del Fuego, the southern bank of the Strait, was part of Terra Australis, the unknown continent. Maps of the era show no passage south of the Strait of Magellan.
Some 80 years later, in 1602, the Dutch established the Dutch East India Company (the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) and granted it a monopoly to trade with the “Spice Islands” east of Cape of Good Hope and west of the Strait of Magellan.

 NGA chart with the GeoGarage platform

One of the founders and the first president of the VOC was Isaac Le Maire.
He soon fell out with the board and was expelled in 1605 with the prohibition never to trade in VOC territory.
For a number of years he complied, but then the temptation became too great and he got permission to establish an “Australische Compagnie” or “South Company” and to launch an expedition to investigate the possibility of trade with the unknown Southern Continent.
His intention, from the start, was to find a new way to the East Indies, bypassing the exclusive routes of the VOC.
He purchased two vessels, the Eendracht (about 40m (130 feet) long with a crew of 65) and the Hoorn (about 30m (98 feet) long with a crew of 22) and had them fitted out by Captain Willem Schouten.

 Jacob Le Maire 

Le Maire appointed his son Jacob as leader of the expedition.
They sailed from the city of Hoorn, which was an important investor in the adventure, in June 1615. After calling at Cape Verde and Sierra Leone in Africa to replenish stores, water in particular, they arrived at what is today Puerto Deseado in the South of Argentina early December.
It is a protected inlet with a tidal range of over five meters, ideal to ground the vessels and clean their hulls of molluscs and other growth.
The cleaning was done by scratching the hulls with burning grass and scrubs.
During this work the Hoorn caught fire, and when the flames reached the gunpowder room, the vessel exploded and was irretrievably lost.
All of the crew survived and they then spent some weeks recovering was could be saved to put it on board Eendracht.

Beagle canal (SHN nautical charts)

On January 13, 1616, they set sail on the next leg of the trip.
They continued south past the latitude of the Strait of Magellan.
Here the coast of Tierra del Fuego forced them to sail eastbound in bad and cold weather.
Captain Schouten was tempted to abandon the search and set sail for Cape of Good Hope, unconvinced of the existence of a passage to the east and less secure without the assistance of his support vessel Hoorn. 
Jacob Le Maire insisted, and they continued.
On January 24, they found an opening and against current, waves and wind they managed to sail through.

Isla de los Estados with the GeoGarage platform (UKHO chart)

To the west was Tierra del Fuego, to the east there was land which they called Staten Land, not knowing it was an island.
Today it is called Staten Island, just like the island at the entrance of the Hudson River in New York, both named in honor of the General Staten of Holland, the Dutch government at the time.

 1633 map of Strait of Magellan, showing Strait Le Maire at the right, marked Fretum le Maire (Latin) and Straet Le Maire (Dutch)

They called the passage “Strait Lemaire.”
Continuing south, they sailed by various islands, some of which still today carry the names they were given then.
On the afternoon of January 29, 1616, they came by a cape which they realized was the southernmost of all and called it Kaap Hoorn in honor of the city they had sailed from.
They crossed the Pacific Ocean and arrived in Djakarta on the island of Java at the end of October 1616.
Instead of congratulating them with their discovery, the VOC-appointed governor did not believe their story and confiscated their ship and the goods on board.
Le Maire, Schouten and some of the crew were shipped to Holland as criminals for having infringed the monopoly of the VOC.
Jacob Le Maire died on board at the end of December.
The others arrived in Holland by July 1617. Isaac Le Maire was of course most distressed for having lost his son and his ships.
He claimed against the VOC for the confiscated vessel.
He won the case and recovered 65,000 florins.
But in the meantime the Dutch set up a new company, the West India Company, which they granted the monopoly of trading with the Americas, including the route via Cape Horn.
As a result Le Maire could not take advantage of his son’s discovery.
He died a bitter man in 1624, but his name lives on, 400 years later.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Vendee Globe : Cape Horn and ice danger

Why we’ve been hugely underestimating the overfishing of the oceans

What if everything we know about the amount of fish in the ocean isn't true?
What if the quantity of fish we catch is much higher than we realize?
What if we're heading for a global fishing catastrophe that could trigger a food crisis for millions?
In a multi-year investigation, an international team of scientists led by Dr. Daniel Pauly has set out to challenge dangerous assumptions about the amount of fish we remove from the oceans.
Dr. Pauly contends that as governments and regulators report on commercial fishing, and claim the oceans can handle the huge catches - they're wrong.
The official data fails to account for entire categories of fishing, including small-scale, recreational, and illegal fishing (collectively known in the industry as IUU fishing).
If we don't know how many fish we catch?
How can we know that there are enough left?
The fate of one of humanity's most important food sources depends on convincing governments and industry to finally take stock of the missing fish.
"The Missing Fish" film will follow the journey of Dr. Daniel Pauly and his team as they gather information to calculate the world’s total fish catch.
The film is scheduled for release later this year.

From WashingtonPost by Chelsea Harvey

The state of the world’s fish stocks may be in worse shape than official reports indicate, according to new data — a possibility with worrying consequences for both international food security and marine ecosystems.
A study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications suggests that the national data many countries have submitted to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has not always accurately reflected the amount of fish actually caught over the past six decades.
And the paper indicates that global fishing practices may have been even less sustainable over the past few decades than scientists previously thought.

The FAO’s official data report that global marine fisheries catches peaked in 1996 at 86 million metric tons and have since slightly declined.
But a collaborative effort from more than 50 institutions around the world has produced data that tell a different story altogether.
The new data suggest that global catches actually peaked at 130 metric tons in 1996 and have declined sharply — on average, by about 1.2 million metric tons every year — ever since.

 In this April 27, 2011 photo, Atlantic bluefin tuna are corralled by fishing nets during the opening of the season for tuna fishing off the coast of Barbate, Cadiz province, southern Spain.

(AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

The effort was led by researchers Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller of the University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us project.
The two were interested investigating the extent to which data submitted to the FAO was misrepresented or underreported.
Scientists had previously noticed, for instance, that when nations recorded “no data” for a given region or fishing sector, that value would be translated into a zero in FAO records — not always an accurate reflection of the actual catches that were made.
Additionally, recreational fishing, discarded bycatch (that is, fish that are caught and then thrown away for various reasons) and illegal fishing have often gone unreported by various nations, said Pauly during a Monday teleconference.
“The result of this is that the catch is underestimated,” he said.

So the researchers teamed up with partners all over the world to help them examine the official FAO data, identify areas where data might be missing or misrepresented and consult both existing literature and local experts and agencies to compile more accurate data.
This is a method known as “catch reconstruction,” and the researchers used it to examine all catches between 1950 and 2010.  
Ultimately, they estimated that global catches during this time period were 50 percent higher than the FAO reported, peaking in the mid-1990s at 130 million metric tons, rather than the officially reported 86 million.
As of 2010, the reconstructed data suggest that global catches amount to nearly 109 million metric tons, while the official data only report 77 million metric tons.

Overfishing causing global catches to fall 3X faster than estimated

This news can be interpreted as both good and bad news.
On the one hand, “it means that fisheries are more important than we think,” Pauly said — in other words, when catches were at their highest, they were producing more food for the world than scientists previously thought.
This is a plus for global food security in the authors’ eyes.
Overfishing and the subsequent decline of the world’s fish stocks can be a threat to the food security of cultures that rely heavily on fish — but Pauly suggests that if we implement better management techniques in the future that allow these stocks to replenish themselves, we may be able to feed more people than we thought, as the new data suggest.

On the other hand, the higher catch numbers also suggest that fishing has been even more unsustainable in the past than scientists thought.
And the world is now suffering the consequences, as the authors point out.

Their second major finding was that fish catches have been sharply declining from the 1990s up through 2010 — much more severely than the FAO has reported.
At first, the authors thought that these declines might be due to increased restrictions by certain countries on fishing quotas in recent years.
But when the researchers removed those countries from their calculations, they found that the catch data was still caught up in a downward trend.
“Our results indicate that the declining is very strong and the declining is not due to countries fishing less,” Pauly said during the teleconference.
“It is due to the countries fishing too much and having exhausted one fish after the other.”
The data indicate that the largest of these declines come from the industrial fishing sector.
To be clear, the research is not meant to assess the state of the world’s fisheries, Pauly added — but, nonetheless, the study does raise some important questions about fisheries management moving forward. 

Russia saw the giant ships drains tons of fish in the coast of Morocco Dakhla

The authors suggest that, in the future, the FAO might consider requiring nations to submit catch statistics separately for both large-scale and small-scale fisheries in order to ensure that small-scale fisheries don’t fly under the radar.
They also point out the importance of stock rebuilding — that is, enacting fishing quotas to cut down on overfishing and allow fish stocks to replenish themselves.
Such action may become even more important in the future, as additional factors — most notably, the effects of climate change — place even more pressure on global fish stocks, Pauly noted.
“In the future there will be another mechanism that will begin to play a role [in catch declines] — that is global warming — and it will be very difficult to separate from the effects of fishing,” he said. 

So while a few countries have already implemented fishing caps, he predicted that the world will continue to see a sharp and continual decline in catch until better practices are enacted worldwide.
And this will be important to consider, not only for the health of the oceans, but for the health of the millions of people worldwide who depend on fish for their food and their livelihoods.
With good management, though, there’s room for optimism, Pauly suggested.
“The fact that we catch far more than we thought is, if you like, a positive thing,” he said during the teleconference.
“If we rebuild stocks, we can rebuild to more than we thought before. Basically, the oceans are more productive than we thought before.”

-> FAO’s response to the Nature Communications article “Catch reconstructions reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining"

Links :

• The Guardian : Overfishing causing global catches to fall three times faster than estimated