The Neolithic stone circle at Avebury, Wiltshire, had several stones removed by local villages who wanted stone to build cottages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avebury
In the centre of this screen, just south of Tunnel House In, you can see a square outline in a field. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Coates,+Cirencester/@51....
That's a Roman camp. It's been ploughed over (it's just a field) and unscrupulous metal detectorists have plundered the site: http://www.bgas.org.uk/tbgas_bg/v119/bg119083.pdf
People taking this metal from sunken ships aren't just cleaning up a mess, they're destroying historical information.
And who knows what stuff is on the ships (oil, fuel) that isn't being properly cleaned up, just dumped into the ocean?
Most sunken ships, they just sit there and nobody wants to take responsibility and maintain them so that no oil and fuel gets into the ocean. Furthermore, there is little to see. Sure there is some historical information on them but we should save those otherwise the ocean destroys them (surely but slowly).
If those sunken ships were properly maintained, I would also call those scrapers thieves because they take something that belongs to someone else and it has value to them. But since most are just sitting there, waiting to slowly decay.
The only things those scrapers should be held responsible for, is when they damage a tank or something like that which pollutes the ocean (and there should be resources on how to do that safely). But then again, those fuel tanks will leak at some point anyway (they won't last forever) and it should be our responsibility (as humans) to make sure that does not happen.
Who cares? If you really cared about that historical information, you'd salvage it and put it on display in a museum. "Historical information" isn't doing anyone any good sitting on the ocean floor.
>And who knows what stuff is on the ships (oil, fuel) that isn't being properly cleaned up, just dumped into the ocean?
Again, who cares? If you cared, you'd clean it up properly yourself, instead of just leaving it there to leak out into the ocean. The USS Arizona is still visibly leaking diesel fuel out into the water, and no one's doing anything about that, so it's hypocritical for you to complain about this.
This whole subject is just fraught with silly, misplaced sentimentality. I do personally agree that oil and fuel should be properly cleaned up, but we don't do that now, so it obviously isn't a valid concern. I do agree that historical information should be preserved, but we don't do that now (by leaving it inaccessible to the general public on the ocean floor in a remote part of the Pacific), so it obviously isn't a valid concern.
One issue that does deserve some attention is what should be done to any human remains in the wrecks. But if the salvage operations themselves were legal, so the recovery operations didn't have to operate on the sly, it should be possible to get them to obey minimal standards of decency.
The governments that owns the vessels should also get a cut.
I'm all for museums and saving history, but this isn't it. Museums are great: you take something that could otherwise be lost, and you preserve and protect it and put it on display so that people can see it and learn from it. Keeping people away from a sunken warship doesn't do that at all. And the concern for the feelings of relatives of these long-dead crew is nuts too. How much concern is there for the feelings of the descendants of King Tut with his body on display? With these old ships, there are no bodies in many cases: human remains don't last long in the sea, unless they're locked up in a watertight compartment.
The final paragraph of the article is the only place where they really got it right: if you want to preserve these things, then salvage them yourself and put them in a museum. If you're going to leave something abandoned in the middle of nowhere, you can't get mad when someone comes and takes it.
These ships are maritime war graves. The remains were of men that weren't vikings or ancient Egyptians. They were our grandparents generation. That's pretty damned recent.
How do we balance the opportunity afforded to the salvagers against the grazing rights of the local fisherfolk? Is there a replacement structure that can be sunk locally like a concrete wall or honeycomb? Is there research on the time scale needed to seed the coral colonies? Should we place all pre-1942 steel in a UN mandated market?
[1] http://www.historyofwallasey.co.uk/wallasey/story_of_the_day...
The only difference is the amount of time that has passed.
To me, your wording makes it sound like you think that is a minor difference.
I think it's a major difference in the negative direction.
These maritime war graves that are being robbed are of men whose children or grandchildren are alive.
(How many souls were lost aboard the HMS Electra alone, over a hundred ?)
A question I'm not sure I want to know the answer to - what are these thieving scumbags doing with the remains of the sailors who died aboard these ships?
It's not appropriate to wax indignant about remains that may have all but disintegrated into unrecognizable mud. These are not organized places, like the parks on land with paths that people walk.
Consider the wreckage of the Titanic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wreck_of_the_RMS_Titanic
No one can simply swin to the bottom of the ocean to pay their respects.
It's unsettling that a local population can not sink some steel to create a rich fishery anymore.