Ireland's National Monuments Service Wreck Viewer | Hacker News Reader

Ireland's National Monuments Service Wreck Viewer

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51 pointscurtis18 comments

Context: https://www.archaeology.ie/underwater-archaeology/wreck-view...

This would make a great AR app: standing at the clifftops, looking out at the empty seas, only to reveal the wrecks and stories lying underneath

I note that each shipwreck record includes a date of loss. I'd be interested to see a histogram of frequency by year.

I was expecting them to be mostly wartime, but clicking around randomly finds they're overwhelmingly "unknown".

They're overwhelmingly known:

awk -vFPAT='([^,]*)|("[^"]+")' -vOFS=, '{if ($1~/^[0-9]+$/){N++; if ($6=="Unknown"){ U++}}} END {print N, U}' Wrecks_April_2018.csv

17972,2137

EDIT: Didn't realise in the above that most wrecks are missing from the map due to unknown coords. Filtering these out we get

3736,1596

It's maybe worth keeping in mind that Ireland was neutral in WWII. I guess that the belligerents still lost many ships in Irish waters (and indeed Irish ships were often attacked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_neutrality_during_World_... ), but it's still some important context.

Probably the most famous wartime loss was the Lusitania off the Old Head of Kinsale. Its fame is partly that it was a Cunard ship like the Titanic, and partly because of the controversy around her cargo. Although it was a passenger liner, it was sunk by a German U-Boat because it was thought to be smuggling arms from the then-neutral US to England.

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

Slightly off-topic, but I've always wondered why the wreck site of the Lusitania appears on in-flight maps. Anyone?

https://www.urbanghostsmedia.com/2015/01/rms-lusitania-wreck...

I clicked on 4 wrecks. 3 of them are from 1940.

The headline is a wonderful example of syntactic ambiguity. :)

It's dark days we are living in when the National Monuments Service can just go around wrecking viewers whenever they feel like it

Very interesting. Noticed apart from wrecks near the coast the number of wrecks seems to be pretty evenly distributed and probably continues out beyond the purple border?

I'd question the accuracy of the data. I grew up in the largest fishing port on the west coast. Curious to see what was in the bay I was dismayed to find boats listed that were lost elsewhere and wrecks I fished on not listed at all.

Thats pretty cool, I was a lifeguard back in 1998 and on a quite day looked out to see a really strange shape in the water, looked like a large triangle but it was the bow of the Carol Anne sinking(W09527), never knew the name until today. I paddled out but the fishermen had been picked up by another trawler by the time I got out, helped them pick up a pile of fish boxes that kept popping up.

"We regret that we are unable to supply descriptive details for this record at present"

Which wrecks actually have info?

Is this just a heatmap of ship traffic? Or are those dense places really more hazardous?

It probably is mostly traffic as it's concentrated more at Cork and the east coast. The west coast would be much more hazardous than the east coast as it's exposed to the Atlantic ocean usually bares the brunt of most storms we get.You can see this on the map itself in how the west coast has eroded.

Most of what is happening on the west coast would be fishing.

Quite a few of the wrecks also seem be close to the coast because sinking ships had time to reach the coast before they completely sank.

World wars. This is more a venn diagram of where shipping routes intersected with German patrols. (See the prevalence of 1917 and 1940s wrecks.) I'd be interested in seeing an animation of these over time. I suspect we would see changes in range/depth as technology and tactics changed during the wars.

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