Exceptionally Preserved Ancient Ships Discovered in the Black Sea | Hacker News Reader

Exceptionally Preserved Ancient Ships Discovered in the Black Sea

smithsonianmag.com

257 pointsThevet37 comments

"The wrecks survive in such good condition because at a certain depth the Black Sea has anoxic, or oxygen-free, conditions preventing decay. Many of the ships sit at the bottom of the sea with their masts upright, their rudders still at the ready and their cargo bays full of untouched goods."

As far as I know, this oxygen-free water layer below approximately 150 meters from the surface makes Black Sea unique. Virtually anything drowned in it from the beginning of marine history is in perfect condition. If I was a beginner archaeologist who dreams of big discoveries then I'd look at the Black Sea in the first place.

> If I was a beginner archaeologist who dreams of big discoveries then I'd look at the Black Sea in the first place.

While being careful to avoid adding to the collection, of course.

the poor man's cryogenic

Yeah it kind of boggles my mind that this isn't a well explored area due to its preservation characteristics

Perhaps because distributing our efforts over different areas gives us a broader view of history?

I think that it is because most archaeologists tend to explore places where they live and where they know something about. And where they can get funding. Like Mediterranean sea. Underwater archaeology is very expensive. There are guys who explore shipwrecks to sale treasures from them, you can look at their financial reports here (it is not easy for them): http://www.odysseymarine.com/

I doubt it has much to do coordinated efforts to achieve globally optimum results, and more to do with practicalities of where researchers are located, what sort of funding is available and the like.

Of course what an archeologist studies in due to the interaction on many different drivers, but a main one is novelty of the find. Find one good site and an archeologist can support a career studying it. Exploring new places and discovering unique artifacts is at the heart of the myth of the archeologist. Indian Jones, King Tuts tomb, etc.

I agree, but I think that kind of factor is very different to what the comment I was replying to was talking of, in "because distributing our efforts over different areas gives us a broader view of history" as if it was some sort of co-ordination with the goal of creating a broader view. What you're talking about is an individual seeking novelty.

Until the ‘90s it was a heavily militarized sea more or less controlled by the Soviets. Not the ideal environment for research by Western institutions, and Soviet ones had other priorities.

The Baltic also has excellent preservation properties. Of course there's the Vasa (absolutely must-see if you're ever in Stockholm!), but there's also other stuff. The other day I listened to a local archelogist who was finding stone-age fish-traps and settlements out to sea which, thousands and thousands of years ago, was on the coast.

There are also no big currents, tide or other water movements. Black Sea is fairly closed pond.

> oxygen-free water layer below approximately 150 meters unfortunately the the oxygen level shrunk to 90m in 2015.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/oxygen-black-sea-has-dec...

Actually from the perspective of preserving artifacts this is a good thing right? It's saying there is even less oxygen in the water which is good. In terms of life in the sea it's probably bad.

Wouldn't all the preserved stuff be directly at the bottom, though? So the only change to preserving would be in places where the bottom is 90-150m, and the only stuff it would apply to is whatever sank after the level changed to 90m, so it can't be a lot or very interesting.

Anoxic water aren't actually that rare and exist in a lot of freshwater systems (lakes, marshes, etc.) to one degree or another. The range of depths in the Black see is impressive but there are others that are comparable. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_waters#Anoxic_basins

There is a theory that the Black Sea was created cataclysmically when a natural dam broke holding the waters of the Mediterranean back. This is supposedly the source of the Great Flood myth. The article mentioned some flooded villages. I wonder if they will find any evidence in this regard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

> This is supposedly the source of the Great Flood myth

It might be the source of a flood myth. But such myths are pervasive, you can find them in nearly every culture on Earth. Surely such a story has originated more than once.

Given the age of the myths a better hypothesis is that they go back to the sea level rises that accompanied the end of the last ice age.

Allow Stanisław Szukalski to explain [1]:

"When the Secondary Globe (the lavaic ocean bottoms) began to submerge in the beginning of the last Farsolar Epoch, the global seas were forced to glide off the Primary (Geologic) Globe":

And that's why people paint their faces. Also, yetis. Okay, zermatism is controversial, but he produced some very good art and sculpture from it.

[1] http://unurthed.com/2007/12/23/szukalskis-science-of-zermati...

Yeah, that's bullshit, sorry.

I believe DNA research has traced human origins down to 50,000 people living in the Levant, near the Black Sea, many thousands of years ago. So, the flood myth later manifested by many cultures could have a common source.

This is awesome, now where are the 3D scans?

Their website seem down [0]. Here a cute video though [1]. Some nice pictures [2].

> All of the artefacts that were found by the team have been 3-D printed using one of the most detailed 3-D printers in the world.

Next time just create a .torrent file...

[0] http://blackseamap.com

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWtX233YQNc

[2] http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/incredible-ship-grave...

Those pictures and 3D models look extraordinary. According to that iflscience article, there will be a documentary about these findings soon. I can't wait.

Previous discussion on a NYT article on this subject:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12936511

Fascinating. Would love to see Google (who's mission is to collect the world's information) start 3d scanning and mapping the world underwater in a more detailed way.

They don't have tech to blur fish faces yet.

https://www.google.com/maps/@-8.7370392,119.412259,2a,82.2y,...

https://www.google.com/streetview/#malaysia-highlights/tedau...

I don't know if it remains true, because they had started an underwater mapping by drone project. But, until recently, or perhaps still, we had more accurate maps of the surface of the moon than we had maps of the bottom of the oceans.

There is a bunch of stuff we have left to do. There's still a constant stream of discoveries being made in the depths of the oceans.

The science is hardly settled and, I suppose, that's what makes it so exciting. We have critters we can't even fully understand how they survive, and then we have all sorts of smaller mysteries. Like eels... We only first observed them mating just a couple of years ago, and that was just a single species.

> But, until recently, or perhaps still, we had more accurate maps of the surface of the moon than we had maps of the bottom of the oceans.

I believe this is still true. The search for the missing Malaysian airliner ended up producing way better maps of the seafloor in the search region than had ever been done before. That search region is a teeny tiny portion of the entire seafloor and it took years.

https://eos.org/project-updates/geological-insights-from-mal...

Meanwhile the entire moon has been mapped down to 328 feet resolution:

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2...

I remember reading somewhere about some organization (not Google) hoping to map the entire ocean floor by sometime in the 2020s, but it is truly a gargantuan undertaking. As you say, we have far better mappings of the moon than we do of the ocean, and for good reason.

The data report [0] from the MH370 search offers good insight for how little we know of the ocean, and why it is so difficult to map in its entirety. Two points really stood out to me from their findings: 1) the current quality of our topographical maps and other images are low quality and mostly unhelpful for any sort of real research or analysis; 2) it took 3 years of dedicated masses of search teams from multiple countries just to produce quality maps of a tiny stretch of one part of one ocean.

To put numbers behind it, the MH370 report referenced above calculated their entire mapping efforts this way: "The search for MH370 collected 278,000 square kilometres of bathymetry data within the search area and 710,000 square kilometres of data in total, which includes the data acquired in transit between port and the search area. It is one of the largest marine surveys ever conducted." That's a lot of time (3 years), money ($160M, granted not all spent on mapping), and people, for a good chunk of sea floor. But the oceans comprise 360,000,000 square kilometers. Three years of dedicated, coordinated searching in the "largest marine survey" ever only mapped 0.2% of the ocean floor. So who knows what sort of motivation, incentives, time, and organizations it will take to get 100%.

[0] https://geoscience-au.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.htm...

There are approximately 3x10^28 molecules of water per cubic meter (assuming pure water, which is obviously not the case).

A third of the way to the moon, there are approximately 7x10^6 molecules of hydrogen per cubic meter[0].

From high earth orbit (assume 60k km), it's about 300k km to the moon.

The average depth of the ocean is about 3.5km.

For simplification, let's assume that a molecule of water and a molecule of hydrogen have the same density (which they don't)

From high earth orbit, in a straight line to the moon, there would be about 2x10^12 hydrogen molecules in the way.

From the ocean surface to the average depth, there would be about 1x10^32 water molecules in the way.

Not getting into the optical properties of water vs hydrogen, or the fact that the math is much different for a probe orbiting the moon, there's just more "stuff" between the ocean surface and the ocean floor, and a satellite and the moon.

[0] - http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/facts.html

It'll be interesting to see if there are any other antikythera mechanisms buried down there.

That would be a good place to search for such things.

The Smithsonian Magazine still has some of the most atrocious mobile ads I see on any website today. They really make me never want to click their links from a phone, even though I know it's stuff I would find fascinating.

The ads where you have to scroll to make them go away are the worst

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