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Sunken Ship

The ocean and woods are not friends. Wooden vessels lost at ocean don't tend to survive for very long. In warmer waters, shipworms will make a tasty repast out of the wood, while any iron will corrode and rust abroad in brusk order. When we recover wooden vessels, it tends to exist because they were either buried in atmospheric condition that protected much of the hull or sank in cold, anoxic waters that back up minimal to no life. While these hull-preserving environments are comparatively rare, they tin preserve a send for orders of magnitude than it would otherwise take survived. In this case, information technology did so.

The BBC reports on an amazing find in the Black Sea — a 2,400-year-onetime Greek trading vessel, institute intact, at the bottom of the sea flooring. The Black Body of water is a largely anoxic environment considering the upper and lower water layers do not mix. The majority of the life in the Blackness Sea lives at shallow depths and, when information technology dies, sinks to the bottom. The bacteria that break downwardly biological textile at depth consume the available oxygen, while overall h2o mixing between layers is limited by the shallowness of the straits that connect the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

Imagine having two deep pools of water that are only linked by a shallow channel that allows just the topmost water in each pool to actually intermix, and you've got a (simplified) idea of the how the Black Body of water and the Mediterranean swap fluid. When the water level in the Black Sea is as well depression, the connection with the Mediterranean can intermission altogether. Information technology was even one time theorized that the reconnection of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean might have led to catastrophic flooding that gave ascent to some of the Inundation Myths of the people that lived in this area, though that theory is contested.

Regardless, it's the unique anoxic atmospheric condition within the Black Body of water that gave united states this amazing observe:

Black-Sea-Ship

The vessel has been dated to 400 BC and looks remarkably like to a transport painted on the then-called Siren Vase, which depicts Odysseus leap to the mast as his men sail past the deadly Sirens. This might seem to raise questions of how it could exist truthful, given that the Odyssey and Illiad were distant history to the Greeks of 400 BC.

Credit: Werner Forman/Getty Images

This is less of an issue that it might seem. While the events chronicled in the Iliad and the Odyssey were supposed to have taken place long before this vessel sailed, it was not uncommon for stories to draw modern armor, weapons, or styles of dress when telling mythological stories. In the days before photography or book-binding, creating detailed representations of the style things used to look was much more difficult. At the same time, one way that historians investigate the historicity of events like the Iliad is by searching the text for anachronistic elements that signal to an older origin for the characters and areas they depict. The historicity of the Iliad is a fascinating topic in its ain right. And the designs of Greek vessels as painted on their amphorae take been traced through epochs and periods of shipbuilding, back through the Minoan civilization and as far back as the mythical Argo.

The vessel is reportedly in a safe location and is non deteriorating. The team that discovered it has not notwithstanding managed to investigate the cargo bay but hopes to return and do then.

Height image credit: Black Sea Map/EEF Expeditions.

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