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Comment by ocfnash | Hacker News Reader

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ocfnash·

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

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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.

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