Ologies with Alie Ward - Maritime Archaeology (SHIPWRECKS) with Chanelle Zaphiropoulos

Episode Date: April 27, 2021

Shipwrecks. Treasure. Sunken planes. Scuttled submarines. New life forming around old machinery. There’s an -ology for that -- just ask Maritime Archaeologist and wreck nerd Chanelle Zaphiropoulos. This absolutely charming and passionate scuba diver, history buff and antiquities scholar dishes about pirates, warships, admirals worth admiring, and ships ranging in size from water taxis to the Costa Concordia and Titanic. Also world record diving stats, war graves, how owning a fountain pen can be egregious and why a Midwestern coal barge from the 1970’s is worthy of weeping over. Ahoy! Follow Chanelle at Twitter.com/sharksandwrecks and Instagram.com/sharksandwrecks A donation went to Diving with a Purpose: https://divingwithapurpose.org/ Sponsors of Ologies: alieward.com/ologies-sponsors More links and info at alieward.com/ologies/maritimearchaeology Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and now… MASKS. Hi. Yes. Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's your wallet, which if I'm so important to you, why do you lose me all the time? Allie Ward, back with a watery historical episode of oligies, I've wanted to do this episode for so long, truth be told, I would love to revisit this ology again and again. Perhaps I will. Do you want that? I have a sinking feeling that you do. But first, here's the episode.

So this ologist is an ologyte as well and pitched the topic to me with such zeal and such passion that I just couldn't wait to dive in and hear all about it. This Canadian got her bachelors in classical ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern studies and archaeology from the Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada, where she was also the president of her scuba diving club, and she's like moments away from her masters in maritime archaeology at the University of Malta, we'll talk about what Malta is later. Now, as soon as I learned that her Twitter handle was sharks and wrecks, I was like,

I got to know this lady, I need her in my life. She's so enthusiastic about the science and the culture and her approach to what lost craft represent in terms of history and lives is really beautiful. I think you're going to dig this archaeologist real quick, though. Thank you to the patrons who sent in hundreds of questions for this. You can join for as little as a dollar a month. It's 25 cents an episode cheaper than a parking meter, because my love is cheap. And for no monies, you can support the show just by telling friends and tweeting.

You can leave a review for me to discover, since I have read them all. And I look for one to pick out each week, such as Panda Lever, 2005-15, who wrote, I used to make fun of podcast nerds, but now I identify as one. This is a fascinating show and I can't stop listening. Panda Lever, 2005-15, I love you back. Deal with it. And every single person who left a review this week, I read them all, including you, Crash 22 Awesome, and they make 5 a.m.

Wake Up Times to finish the show a bit easier, which is what I have done today. OK, so maritime archaeology. Maritime archaeology comes from mare, which means sea in Latin and archaeos, which is ancient in Greek. And there are very niche differences between marine archaeology, nautical archaeology, and maritime archaeology. But this guest is technically a maritime archaeologist. And also, this gives me an excuse to do more episodes on stuff that's underwater.

So works for me. Now, she took a break from cleaning dive equipment and finishing up her master's thesis to hop on a call to chat about her love of the sea, mapping a sunken submarine, the Titanic, the Bermuda Triangle, pirates, booties, shipworms, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, transatlantic migrations, Atlantis, her favorite ship captain of all time, your new favorite ship captain, thoughts on plundering wreck treasure and the life that blooms around tragedy. So batten down your hatches and shiver your timbers for a chat with maritime

archaeologist Chanel Zafiropoulos. My name is Chanel Zafiropoulos or Zap, whatever is easier. And she, her. And I'm going to make you say it one more time slowly just to make sure that I say it right. Sure. I'll even hold the mic closer. Zafiropoulos. And then the first name is just Chanel, like the perfume, but Zafiropoulos. Honestly, it's just like it's spelled.

It's easy peasy. Ship's ahoy, let's go. I've wanted to do maritime archaeology since before this podcast started. I know there's not a lot of maritime archaeologists out there. There's not. Yeah, there's not a lot of us. And I mean, the cool thing about that is that we all study such like different unique things, which I love.

Are there different maritime archaeologists who study like battleships and wooden boats and submarines? Or is it like a sunken boat is a sunken boat? No, absolutely. So I had a professor who is the curator of the Maritime Archaeology Museum in Malta. His super niche specialty is food, like really on boats. Yes, like it's wonderful. I love it.

But there's absolutely people who are specialists in wood boats, traditional boat building specialists from different regions. So you've got like ethnographers. You've got tradespeople who are involved in it, all these sort of fun things. And absolutely naval historians like nautical archaeology. And do you have to leave the United States to do maritime archaeology? Or is there a lot of it in the Great Lakes or why Malta? So I'm Canadian.

So I wasn't super planning to go to the states to study it. Now, there are a few universities in the states that do do grad programs in maritime archaeology. So in the US, Chanel says the University of Florida, East Carolina University, Texas A&M, they all have maritime archaeology programs. So look at it, y'all, gators and pirates and dogs. Oh, my. So there's definitely programs in the states. And states has a great budget for maritime archaeology

because there's this like military pride. And that's what a lot of funding for maritime archaeology comes from. That sort of naval interest. For me, Malta was the choice because my family roots are from the Mediterranean. So it was a chance for me to sort of go home. And I feel less like a foreigner in Malta than I would have in Texas. I feel like. And you even have done some Maltese boat restoration, too.

When did that start? Yes. So I did not do the restoration myself. My class documented a boat that was being restored in the Maritime Museum. There were seven of us in our class and we were the biggest we'd ever had. So so our professor wanted us to document the restoration process that was going on on a pretty dilapidated traditional Maltese boat that was going to be put into the museum. So I mean, with only seven of us, we could all fit into that, you know,

workshop, we could all ask our questions, we could all take our pictures. Just something you don't get in a massive program. Could you all fit in the boat also? We probably could. It's a pretty small boat. So this is a small, colorful Maltese boat. And I looked it up and I was trying to figure out how to say this word. And it's like attempting to pronounce the wind. I couldn't do it.

It's spelled D, G and H wearing some kind of hat. JSA, the phonetic key for it was just a bunch of upside down letters. I couldn't find a video of anyone saying it. Chanel later told me the name for this boat, Gengsha. I don't know. She told me it's one of those words you just surrendered to copying and pasting. Malta, I love this word. I love you. I'm sorry I failed the pronunciation.

Now, another similar boat is called a Farila, and it looks kind of like a gondola wearing a colorful, flirty paint job. But basically this boat was a water taxi. Oh. So when British boats were like naval vessels were stationed in the harbor, like you've got these great big huge boats that people are on out in the open sea. They can't really get super up close to land. So you load people into these smaller boats and they take you to shore.

Or in modern day, like taking you across from one campus to another, as I did in Malta, which was a lot of fun. And were you always a seafarer of some sort? Oh, gosh, yes and no. So I mean, my dad is great. My mom is Italian. They both immigrated to Canada. And I think as a kid, I had this idea that they immigrated like their families came over by boat.

And then that was just something that was never discussed. I think my mom actually came over by plane. Chanel told me as a child, she'd read books about folks immigrating to the United States before her family who traveled by boat and she just assumed her family did the same. But she notes that not asking about your family's history is very different than being robbed of that knowledge by forced migration. And her grandfather was on the open ocean a lot, though,

traversing the seas to Venezuela for work six months at a time. So Chanel feels like she has a seafaring constitution. Does she, though, do you get seasick? I'm going to guess no. I've been seasick like twice and once I'm pretty sure it was food poisoning. But yeah, I did my undergrad in Newfoundland. So and I actually started off in marine biology.

So I was out on this like small little boat in the North Atlantic being tossed around by waves, trying to read instruments and whatnot. You get over seasickness very quickly. Yeah, I bet. Yeah. So did you start off studying marine ecology? As a child, I had this like romantic idea. I wanted to do everything and I did not want to compromise. I was very into ballet and my theory was

I was going to work as a scientist during the day and perform ballets at night. A lot of five hour energy drinks. Yeah. And like I didn't want to pick one type of biology. I wanted to be a cross-terra biologist, which was something my brother came up with. And basically just like I wanted to study bats. I wanted to study groundhogs. I wanted to study marine creatures, but definitely the marine environment had my heart hands down.

So when I had to pick, there was no debate. Yeah, and I just always loved the sea. Like I loved everything about the sea, but I did not know maritime archaeology was a thing when I was younger. And so I very much had this idea in my head that I wanted to study the ecosystems that grow on shipwrecks. I don't know how I got this idea as a kid, but I knew this was a thing. And I was like, that's what I want to do.

And I just like slowly, slowly work towards it. Eventually was in like my final year of university found out about this program at Malta was like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to apply and see what happens. It is such a specialized field. But, you know, this makes me think because before if a vessel sinks, someone's like, where is it? You're like, oh, it's in the ocean.

But when did we actually start getting to study these shipwrecks? And by we, I mean, people like you, definitely not me. But was it when we developed sonar rate or like, how did it work? Great questions. Yeah, so I actually wrote a paper that was going through for a review and it was a paper on maritime mortuary culture. So death at sea. I mean, made this like comment about.

How like, yeah, good luck finding a body at sea. Like, obviously not like that in a more academic sense. That 2019 paper by the by was titled Buried in Brine Maritime Mortuary Practices During the Age of Sail. What even is her life? It's enthralling is what it is. Now, sonar, as we know, it came about after 1918. It was developed around World War One.

But some early uses are said to be in the 1400s. When Leonardo da Vinci like screamed into an underwater tube, it said. And sometimes I'm like, did Da Vinci really invent all this shit? Or did you just have like the best publicist ever? Good luck finding out. But back on topic, marine mortuary science is difficult. Good luck finding where a particular body drifted in 300 kilometers of sea. So, yeah, so in that sense, it's still very difficult to do that sort of work.

Studying shipwrecks themselves, it's happened for a while. Like we've been doing it in some way, shape or form for a while. Definitely the advent of scuba gear and sonar just escalated it like crazy. Because we used to have diving bells. We used to have these like great big canisters. We could lower down into the water and with like piped air from the surface. And people would work and that's how they would work on like bridges. So we did have ways to explore underwater before self-contained underwater breathing apparatus was a thing.

But just it was very limited. Definitely sonar makes it so much easier to locate things and communications, I would say, is the other big thing. We know where the Titanic went down because we knew exactly how far into its voyage it was. When it sank, we knew exactly what sort of latitude it was supposed to be traveling at. And we had communications via telegram if it had deviated versus before that. OK, a ship didn't make it to Harbor. You didn't find out about that until months later when it was supposed to have come back.

And it still hasn't. OK, so it was supposed to go from England to New Hampshire. What latitude did it end up with? Did bad weather force it to take a farther south trajectory? So it's like pretty much good luck trying to trying to figure that out. Well, OK, the Titanic could send texts. Yes. So in the late 1800s, electromagnetic radiation was used to communicate morse code wirelessly from ships and lighthouses. And it could travel about 300 miles in the daytime, but double or triple after dark.

So ships could send messages to each other. Rich people could send a telegram to shore, probably composing carefully like we do our vacation grams to seem both humble but also luxurious. But the channels were flooded with chatter and warnings about ice didn't get picked up, which is the absolute worst possible version of did not see your text. But another ship heard her calls and saved some of the 700 survivors, although 1500 lives were lost to the sea off Newfoundland, 12,600 feet deep. And the world record for deepest dive of a human hits 330 meters or around a thousand feet.

How far into your studies were you when you got to dive around your first wreck? Oh, OK, so I was like 11 when I started diving. My parents really hoped I would hate it. They're like, get a nice safe career, like a lawyer or something. But no, I loved it. I think I was like 13 when I did my first wreck swim through. So like I was snorkeling around or seeing lots of wrecks. I wasn't approaching them.

And then when I was like 13, we went to this little wreck. Basically, all it was was the cabin didn't have any doors on it. And you could just swim from one door to the next. It was like two meters into the wreck and just like, OK, check that off. And then eventually did wreck certifications and got more into it. I was in university when I got properly rec certified. You don't need a rec certification to dive near a wreck, but to actually go inside. It's a little bit more dangerous.

So they require some more skills and practice and whatnot. Can you tell me a little bit about what maritime archaeologists do? Are they collecting samples? Do they raise the ships off of the seafloor or is that very verbatim? And it's like, keep it there. You're going to hate me, but I'm going to say it depends. Very classic scientist response. Institutions and governments have different practicing policies

in different parts of the world. And then it also depends on your interests and your budget. But just a big thing. So there definitely have been wrecks that have been entirely surfaced. The Mary Rose, the Vasa is a big one. The Labelle that was found in the Gulf of Mexico near Texas. It was by a Texas archaeologist who actually surfaced it. Just a quick aside, some cliff notes.

The Mary Rose was a 16th century English Tudor warship that capsized off the Isle of Wright and was raised up in the 1970s. And the Vasa is a Swedish warship that sank in the Stockholm Harbor on its maiden voyage in 1628. Thousands of people had gathered to see her off and rounded a corner, hit some wind, flooded, sank. Now, the LaSalle sank in a bay off the Gulf Coast in the late 1600s and was excavated in the 1990s.

Hundreds of lives were lost in these wrecks. Millions of artifacts were salvaged. But there are a lot of conservation issues, even if you manage to raise the funds to raise the ship. They spend like millions of dollars on the process of surfacing them, plus the conservation and the conservation for a lifetime. It will never stop. You're going to continuously put money into it,

not to mention like energy and everything else. So it's like, how big of a benefactor do you have if you want to surface something? And then it also like, for me, there's the ethics of it. Some shipwrecks don't have a lot of marine life growth on it. They're not having a big ecological impact. So I'm like, OK, maybe you can surface it. Some have a negative impact. And so you're like, yes, do surface it.

And then some is like, no, it's doing more good where it is. Like it serves a purpose where it is. Everything in archaeology has an equilibrium in terms of decay. So it's going to reach a certain point where it's no longer going to decay underwater and underwater actually, depending on the the environment, might be better for it than anything we can do on land. So if it's not in harm by shipping lanes, it's not in a site where there's going to be like development.

Maybe you're going to put an offshore wind farm there. You might want to just leave it because it's going to cost a lot. And it's, you know, it's doing some good where it is. So yeah, it's definitely a mixed bag. Yeah. And, you know, sunken treasure did one person find sunken treasure one time? And then everyone's like a bunch of ships out there with gold on it. Or was that an actual thing where their banks were like

in the hull? I wish I knew. I wish I knew more about pirates and whatnot. I know a lot more about corsairs than I do about pirates. What's a corsair? Okay. Most of the corsairs are often called air quotes, legal pirates. And that's not entirely true.

Privateers, sorry. And then corsairs. Pirates do it for themselves, right? Like they're the thieves of the high sea. They are looking after their own interests. Corsairs are acting in the name of a country or a religion. Yeah, they do pillage other vessels and they do attack other boats and they do collect literal treasure.

In the case of the Maltese corsairs, it was going to the Vatican. So it was like, you know, funding Catholicism. Wow. Yeah. So but they also did do actual trade. So it might be like jewels and coins that they plundered from other vessels they came across, they might have been like, yeah, this load of pottery is going to fetch a pretty penny. We'll take that, please.

So it wasn't like all treasure, but definitely they did have literal treasure chests and they had three keys to these treasure chests. The captain, I think it was the priest and then the doctor all had one key. So you couldn't open it unless you had all three keys to make sure that the captain didn't steal from it because that was partially going to be your wages as your crew. There are legit pirateologists out there. And one day I will talk to one and it will be on this show.

And I'm excited. Also, did you know that Florida has a whole coast called the Treasure Coast? Because 11 Spanish galleons sank in a 1715 hurricane. There's millions of dollars worth of incredibly shiny gold and silver coins out there. And sometimes they just wash ashore like Vegas jackpot style. Only it's Florida and it's pirate treasure. How often is marine archaeology employed in looking for something that was sunk on a vessel, like a big necklace or something?

But I thought the old baby dropped it into the ocean in me. Well, baby, I went down and got it for you. You shouldn't have. For example, in terms of something like that, I don't know if it ever really would because I don't like how much does this necklace have to be worth to warrant the amount of money that you're going to spend looking for it and then excavating it? Because it's not going to just land on the seabed and then 400 years later

be right on the seabed, like you're going to actually have to excavate it more than likely and then go through the whole conservation process. But for bigger items, like the Parthenon marbles that Lord Elgin stole, I think it was like three of the shipwrecks didn't even make it to England. They sank. So when possible vessels that were containing them were found, it was like everybody was like, yeah, let's put the money in. Let's excavate them. Let's study them. Let's see, because those really did not belong there and laws and ethics abound.

I'm sure. Oh, yes. So people were willing to throw money at that. So when she said Elgin marbles, I pictured an actual bag of marbles like in the end of the Goonies. But first off, by marble, they mean marble statues of naked Greek deities. And by Elgin, that was the seventh Earl of Elgin, who some say stole and just straight up looted these statues from Greece.

And then they sank in 1802 on his ship, the mentor. Then they were fished out later and now they're in a museum in London. So folks tend to call them the Parthenon marbles because fuck this Elgin guy and the ship he sank in on. Well, he wasn't on it when it sank in the Mediterranean, where there do seem to be a lot of quality shipwrecks. OK, so Malta, it's little. It's like a little thing hanging off of the boot.

What is it about Malta that it's just just a chock-a-block with shipwrecks? Or are there that many shipwrecks all over the world? OK, so there are many, many shipwrecks. I don't know if we could put an actual number on it, but like millions of shipwrecks all over the world. Oh, my God. Yeah, pretty much anywhere where there's water,

you're going to find like maritime culture. So whether that's the form of shipwrecks or settlements that have fallen into the sea. What I say is like, I don't say I work with shipwrecks. I say I work with submerged material culture. So it's like human things that have ended up under water. OK, so it's a little bit more inclusive. But so anywhere where there's water, you're going to find that because that's something that humans have always needed to survive,

be it fresh water or like salt water, because on islands like Malta, for example, and even like Newfoundland and Greece, you rely on salt for preservation. So it's like this maritime culture is like huge. It's super heavily prevalent. It's always a matter of what preserves. So I mean, you might not see the shipwrecks, but that doesn't mean that they didn't happen. And that doesn't mean that you might not find evidence of them

because there's just so many factors that go into what gets preserved as a shipwreck. Most shipwrecks, do they happen because of weather running around icebergs? What is sinking most of these vessels? Depends. So in some parts of the world, icebergs are definitely more of a concern than they are in other parts of the world. Newfoundland, where I did my undergrad, definitely has a lot more concern with icebergs. There's this whole area called Facebook Alley, where tourists go every year

to watch icebergs actually break off. Beautiful, very sad, but beautiful. But yeah, so I mean, definitely it's a concern there. And Newfoundland, you also have crazy fog. So that's definitely another weather condition. And there have been reports of vessels that just got lost in fog for days and couldn't navigate. And when you have this heavy fog, you don't have wind. So if you're relying on wind power, you can't really get anywhere.

If you're relying on oil, if you happen to be going in the wrong direction, you're just going farther away from land. I haven't the fog yet. A lot of wrecks happen in zones of convergence. The channels things narrow out and you have to go through a potentially more dangerous area. A lot of wrecks happen because of other wrecks. It's something to say, too. Like one ship goes down.

Yeah, like if you if you think back to when ships had mass, like one ship goes down because you navigated wrong or weather or whatever. You now don't have five meters beneath you till the rocks. You have a few meters before the mass, the superstructure, all of that stuff. Some more modern wrecks have alcohol being a case. Oh, yes, the Costa Concordia. Yeah, the Costa Concordia side note was a cruise ship that sank in shallow waters off Tuscany in 2012.

It resulted in 32 deaths and 16 years in prison for the captain who left the ship high and dry with 300 passengers still on it. And perhaps a lot of mafia cocaine on board rumors. They're just rumors. But while on trial for abandoning his post, he explained that he hadn't abandoned. He'd merely slipped off the ship when it turned over and it happened to fall into a lifeboat, which is like a plot point in an Adam Sandler movie.

It's the worst excuse for anything I've ever heard, which is probably why he was sentenced to 16 years in prison. I mean, that what do you think that that was one of the the bigger modern shipwrecks of our time and is it still just hanging out there? No, so they did actually move it. So that's the thing, a lot of modern shipwrecks, especially if they're easily accessible, we will try to move if they're not historic. Because if you can imagine, these all have a lot of oil on board,

especially if it happened at the beginning of a voyage. We don't want that seeping out. So I mean, that vessel, it was only like, it wasn't even submerged. They just like ran aground. They moved it to like a harbor. They moved it somewhere where they could actually like extricate it. And a lot of times you can do like patchwork repairs, get something floating enough to be able to just tow it ashore.

And yeah, decide what to do with it next. A lot of times those turn into artificial reefs, like you clear it out, you get rid of the oil, get rid of any like seat cushions, plop it back down somewhere else where you need it. Does it work to help break the waves as well? Depending on where you put them. Yeah, exactly. It's multi, multi purpose. So a lot of times like there's, I know of a couple wrecks off like

purposefully scuttled US Coast Guard cutters from World War, I think like two, well, it must have been two, that were placed along the US coast so that German U-boats wouldn't go closer because they thought it was treacherous or whatever. So absolutely, wave breaks are a fantastic reason to put them down and a very, very important one because that protects coastal communities that are prone to erosion. So might as well just toss a boat in there.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you're not using it anyways, and then it funds the ecosystem, you know, you get fishermen going out on it, you get tourist dive groups going out to visit it. A lot of times people will see proposals to scuttle these like old ferries or whatever and they're like, that's a waste of taxpayer money. But like, look at the potential benefit that I can have. It might actually gain you more money. And now your work in particular, you are studying the Olympus, the submarine.

This is the site of a shipwreck and there's it's also technically a war grave. It is, yes. And this confuses people because all like whenever I'm talking about it, I'll say how there was, you know, 112, I think people on board. 98 potentially made it off. And they're like, OK, well, how is it a war grave to 90 something people? Or like, you know, 100 people. Like, well, if you don't know where somebody actually died, because some of

the crew did make it back to shore before a whole bunch of them that didn't like the 90 odd people who didn't. We don't have any one place to actually tie to as their final resting place. So we use that closest proxy, the place that had their belongings, the place that they should have been. This is what we relate to as their final resting place. So it's a war grave. It definitely is a war grave for the eight or so people who didn't make it out.

But for everybody else who didn't make it to shore, that's what we will still consider as a point of respect for them. What type of work and diving and investigation do you get to do with it? Or do you has anyone entered it or is it completely sealed? How does it work? Great questions. I don't get to do any diving on it, unfortunately. It's 115 to 120 meters deep.

So you can do an aside with the conversions of that. I'm not I'm very metric. The HMS Olympus, just some stats on that. World War Two sub. It's 86 meters long, six meters wide, and it hit a mine and sunk, killing 89. But it yielded nine survivors who swam seven miles to the shore. And its location was discovered in 2011, about 115 meters below the surface, or about 350 feet deep, which is deep.

So for reference, I've been diving for like 15 years, and I'm only really qualified to dive to 15 meters. So not even half of that. The people that do dive down to it, it's like an eight hour trip. Like they have to come up so slowly for their own safety. And you only get like six to 12 minutes on the bottom, depending on how long your sense is going to be. So there is not much excavation that happens on that site,

partially because of this limitation, but also because it is a war grave. And there are laws that are in place around it, especially because it's a British war grave. Because again, every country has its own laws. So for us, it's a very much a look, don't touch approach. So I work entirely from videos brought up by other divers, because there are divers who can reach it, just not me. And so this is where it sort of becomes a community approach,

because I can't do it myself. We can go down with ROVs, so remotely operated vehicles, and collect some data that way. It's, to my experience, not as good quality as what gets collected by hand. Why is that? Well, an ROV can be a little herky jerky, depending on who is operating it. So imagine your dog grabbing a toy versus like a ghoulish Boston Dynamics canine cyborg. It's just a little uncanny.

I don't know, sitting and watching that video, you hear the machinery moving. There's this bigger presence in the video, and perhaps this is all in my head. But I mean, the fish react to it. Like, fish do not like this huge thing with lights everywhere. Um, making all this noise. So they act very differently around the ROV than they would around divers. If you can, maybe try to get images of this and try to look,

you know, at the attachment structures. Like, I get to sort of theoretically direct where people can look, and then that will impact the quality of the footage we get to, because that means I can do specific analysis, which would be so much cooler. What exactly are you looking for? You've sent a diver down. They've got eight to 12 minutes with a sunken submarine. I feel like it's like one of those grocery shopping games,

where it's like grab as much as you can and get out of here. Everyone's favorite guilty as pleasure. What are they looking for? Yeah, so pretty much. So I mean, a lot of divers that go down, they just want to swim the length of it. They're there for the experience, right? They're not there working for me.

I get this all secondhand. So I have to be very delicate with any requests I make. So a lot of them, they're like, this is like an Everest. They just want to experience as much of it as they can. So in terms of archaeologists, because they have tried to study it, one of my former professors actually tried to do, want to do 3D models of it, because that is how we study underwater wrecks by proxy.

Like, we can't go back and visit a site just whenever we feel like it, because it's, you know, hours away from the port, it's underwater, it's so expensive, you need a whole crew. Like, you can't just go out for a walk and visit the shipwreck. You need like a crew of 10 people. So what he wanted to do was create a 3D model. And because of the organisms that are on that specific shipwreck, the 3D model does not work.

So what I do, because I have a background in marine biology is like, I ideally would get to say, okay, this species has formed here, and this is what this species looks like. So I'm creating what's called an eco map of the wreck itself. And we have a baseline so we can see with continued diving on it. Does it cause damage? Are they benefiting from the increased oxygen? Are they moving?

Like, how is this wreck, because it's a dynamic site. How is this changing over time? I was curious to look up exactly what grows on the HMS Olympus. And a Google return found me a paper titled, The Deep Water Ecology of the HMS Olympus, An Analysis of the Archaeological Impact of Marine Growth on Submerged Material Culture Beneath the Photic Zone. And I was like, snap, does Zap know about this?

And turns out its co-author is indeed Chanel Zephyropolis. So looking at photos of the sunken submarine, it's kind of bedazzled with fan corals and growths and surrounded by flickering pink fish that dart around it. And Chanel deals with the difficulty of making 3D models of something so encrusted and also looks at the ecosystems that thrive outside it. But what about inside? Entering a submarine is like nigh on impossible in terms of safety.

This one has two entrance exit points. So you never would because it's a war grave for one. But on top of that, this one is somewhat safe because there's the blast point where you can enter. And then the hatch is actually open. If only one was available, you wouldn't. It's too risky. But even so, because it did undergo an explosion,

like we have no precedent. Like, I can't say it's safe. I have no clue how the structural integrity of that site is after all this time under water, plus having gone through an explosion. In terms of maritime mortuary science, too, is that across the board if there is someone who passed away on the vessel or if it's considered a grave? It's hands-off?

So in terms of war graves, it's hands-off. But they basically decided that war graves of all sorts have the sovereignty of the nation that they belong to. And that's like a sort of all the signatories have decided, like, we're going to give them this respect. So you can't defame the grave or anything else. That does not apply to sort of merchant vessels, or if a fishing vessel goes down,

like, there's no protections in place, which sucks, which really, really sucks. I am of the opinion that every sort of site of death should be respected. Not to say, like, it's not like I don't want people to visit them. I just don't necessarily agree that you should be going down and taking things or like making funny face pictures with, like, I don't know, ship propellers.

I don't know. Okay, side note. I went on Instagram and got sucked into the watery abyss that is the rec diving hashtag. And there are some beautiful photos of all kinds of humanities, tragedies and foibles and scuttled ships. But there are also a lot of people just taking windows and bottles and portholes to keep as decor in their backyard

on wrecks where scores of people died. And I don't know, it seems weird. Chanel says that she's met many divers who kind of shrug and say, you know, if archaeology is for everyone, then why can't I take it? It should belong to me as much as anyone else. And she says that beyond drawing the distinction between humans belonging to heritage

and not humans owning heritage, the best response she says she's been able to find is that by removing artifacts, they stop it from being accessible to as many people as possible. And one thing that's eagerly sought from wrecks is a ship's bell, which is engraved with her name. And the Titanic's bell was recovered from the seabed in the 1980s. And I don't know, for some reason,

it just gives me shivers to think about it above the surface again. Kind of like seeing a ghost or an eerie resurrection. But those bells can mean a lot to survivors or relatives of survivors of the wreck and are rung at certain times in memorial. That being said, how do maritime archaeologists feel about like the Titanic effect and, you know, James Cameron and shipwrecks as entertainment or lore?

Like, what's the general feel toward that? There's good and there's bad to it, right? Like, if you show that there's a public interest in something, it's easier to get funding to study it or preserve it. But there's also the people who will see that and be very interested in it and see that nothing's happening to it that they can see. Like, you know, an archaeological site on land

might have a fence up around it. Nobody's putting a fence around a shipwreck. Like, we can't do that. We can't put guards at them. We can't put park rangers. So a lot of people will see a shipwreck and be like, oh, yeah, cool. This is here.

It's just going to be damaged by time. I'm just going to take it with me, which is not always a good thing to do. Because a lot of times we see unexploded ordnance going home with people. Unexploded ordnance? Grenades or even just bullets. And those are like the gunpowders inert when it's wet.

But as it dries, like even a bullet could. I've seen things get put on mantles. I'm just like, oh, I'm very, very, very, very worried. About the heat from this fireplace. Even just a bullet exploding could cause a heart attack. I can imagine. I just cringe. Oh my god.

That is not someone's like, I found this cool shell. And you're like, that's a grenade. Yeah. And because it's all concreted. It's got organisms growing off of it. You have no clue. Most of us don't even recognize what a gunshot sounds like. Because they're altered.

Because they sound so fake that they're altered when we hear them on movies and things. Same thing goes. Like we don't understand what a grenade looks like. Especially not when it's been through this, like this process. I have so many questions from listeners. There's so many. And there are such good questions.

Can I lob some Patreon questions at you in a lightning round? Yes, absolutely. But before we do a quick word about sponsors of the show, they let us donate to a good cause each week. And Chanel shows, Diving with a Purpose, DWP. And DWP educates and empowers traditionally disenfranchised people as community scientists. And they started with members of the National Association

of Black Scuba Divers. And they train young divers between the ages of 16 and 23 from diverse backgrounds as underwater archaeology advocates. So to find out more, you can go to divingwithapurpose.org. A donation to them was made possible by some sponsors ofologies. Okay, back to underwater nautical inquisition. We can skip any that you want to, but a lot of folks, Claire Meyer asked this. David Obi, first-time question asker, Katie V, Ruby Johnstone, Moe Casey,

Bugsor Rad, also asked, they all wanted to know in David Obi's words, what's the number one wreck you wish you could freely explore, but you can't? Ruby asked, is there an El Dorado of shipwrecks, a mythical ship that has yet to be discovered? Is there one out there that people are like, where is it? Oh my gosh, I feel like every ship is that until it becomes discovered. And like the thing is, even when we discover a shipwreck, a lot of times we don't know exactly what ship it is until like years of study, right?

Really? It's just super cool. Oh yeah. The HMS Olympus, for example. We can tell from the sonar images that it's a submarine, but there's a few different submarines that went down potentially in that area, because again, we don't have like, it's not like when a flight goes missing, you've got the black box, like radar for the last place.

We don't have that for like older ships. So you do all this detective work before you can dive down to it, because most of us don't have the budget to just be like, yeah, see you later. Make yours away, ladies. This is like, okay, so it's this long, it's this wide, so that fits these different classes of vessels. And oh, we can see this feature so that gets rid of all these different categories. Like so there's all this narrowing down and then like with the Olympus,

they actually dove down and they could see it had its symbol on the actual hull. And they're like, yeah, okay, this is the Olympus. It matched with the survivor records. They could see that the damage to the hull was at the spot that the survivors said it was. You don't get that most of the time if you don't have survivors. Even when you find a shipwreck, we don't know what it is. And like the Labelle is a classic case of one where this archaeologist spent most of his career looking for it.

And I think like the year before he retired was when he finally found it. So like one of my personal heroes is this Greek naval captain. She actually went on to be like the first female lieutenant in the Russian Navy. So her name is Laskarina Bubelina. And she fought during the Greek War of Independence. And like part of me is like, I would love to find any wreck that's associated with her. Probably not going to happen. And that's okay.

But basically because like wooden shipwrecks, when they're damaged in conflicts. So there's a few ways that can happen. You either would try to damage their mast or their rudder so that they can't navigate. And then you try to board a vessel. And this goes for Corsairs as well. You try to board a vessel and then you claim it because boats and the cannons on them are so expensive to make and so labor intensive. A good ship you can use for years on end, right?

So you don't actually want to like just destroy it to smithereens, but you see in a lot of movies, like Pirates of the Caribbean. No. Oh yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. Master in command is a pretty good, like it's not underwater archaeology, but it's like maritime history. So that's a pretty good movie. Sorry, just came to mind.

No, I want to watch that now. Since recording this, I did watch it. And I'll be honest, I was in a mood and I was like, I hate watching all these smelly guys yelling at each other. I'm over it. But also getting back to Admiral Lascarina Bubalina for one second. So this lady was born in prison. Her father was a revolutionary.

She grew up. She had a seafaring husband who was killed by pirates. She took over his shipping business and had more boats built, including a giant warship called Armageddon, which is not a subtle name. And she died in a gun battle with her in-laws. Paintings of her look like the teacher in high school you're terrified of, who also taught you the most and you liked the most. So what happened to her eight ginormous ships?

If they actually did get blown to smithereens or like damaged beyond repair, wood floats a lot more than metal would. So it would just sort of disperse before actually sinking, which is not something that you see in a weather catastrophe or something that runs aground. Something that runs aground and takes on water will sink more or less intact, have a very small debris field. Wood that's going to float, that's in small pieces,

is going to spread a lot more and not sink as much. So it's going to be more scavenged by marine life and worms and everything else. It's funny because you think about all the wooden ships that have sailed for centuries, you're like, yeah, where did they all end up? It's not like there's a big ship junkyard with all of them. You know what I mean? They must all be out in the seas somewhere.

Yeah. And I mean, like, so yeah, that's the thing. A lot of people are like, wow, there's so many, like I'll tell them there's like an infinite number of shipwrecks. Like so many, I can't put a number to it. How don't we, haven't we sailed forever? I'm like, yeah, but a good ship is going to last decades. And anything that's old enough eventually is going to fail.

Like, you know, where it gets repurposed and wood just doesn't survive. Wood decomposes like crazy. That makes so much sense. You know, Alia Meyers had a great question. They asked, what about planes? There's got to be planes in the ocean or cars or submarines, helicopters. Other vehicles must be down there. Is anyone looking for them?

Yeah. So I like that's one of the things I like to use the term wreck, because that's sort of a more encompassing term because anything is wreckage. You know, whether we're a train wreck or yes, certain parts of the world, there are lots of cars underwater. I've done side scan sonar surveys along coastal like roads, and wherever there's a sharp bend in the road, I can see a couple cars on the sonar.

Some of them we know because we get stories of people who like, don't want to pay to take it to junkyard. Like it's a piece of scrap and they just sort of run it off the road. Sometimes you know that there's accidents. Sometimes there's been cases where they had to be investigated by police. So yeah. And then there's also, this happens a couple of times in summer in Greece, and I'm sure all over the world, cars that fall off of ferries,

like just that miss the ramp. Oh, no. I've seen it happen. So they're right in ports. Yeah. Now if you see a car underwater, do you mention it to anyone or? It depends on the area. We will try to get as much detail as possible.

There's areas where we know that it's a known sort of refuge spot. So we might mention it to environmentalists and be like, yeah, okay, something needs to be done. If it's new or if it's a blip or especially if we know that there's somebody that did go missing in an area, we will absolutely mention it. And typically we don't like finding bodies. We don't like working with bodies. So absolutely, any case where we might find one,

it's not entirely our job to do that retrieval, and we will definitely make sure that people get it. But yeah, airplane wrecks, very cool. So the overlap between like aerial archaeology and maritime archaeology is super big, because a lot of the warplanes that have gone down, like World War II, especially planes, a lot of their records of how they were built got destroyed following the wars, burned or just like, oh, we don't need these anymore, scrap them.

So for a lot of different types of airplane wrecks or airplanes, I should say like historically significant like biplanes of things, we have no clue how they were built. So when they get preserved underwater, that's like our only chance to study how they were constructed. Ooh, that's cool. So it's kind of like taking apart a sunken Ikea bookshelf and trying to figure out how you piece it together.

Yeah, pretty much. One way to do it. Just a few for those taking notes. The 1941 Blenheim and the 1943 Bristol bow fighter both sunk off the Malta coast and the crew of the latter were rescued by those water taxis that look like a bad scrabble hand, I can't pronounce, that are like D.G., like a pharila, essentially. There's also the Micronesian Chuk Lagoon,

which is a former Japanese naval base that Jack Castot explored, calling it the Lagoon of Lost Ships and for some vintage documentary vibes, look for his 1969 film. Further exploration suddenly yields an unexpected find in the northwest anchorage of the lagoon. Now, speaking of yore, a ton of people asked about age of shipwrecks, like first time question asked by Sammy Baker, Marty Goodwin,

Cheyenne Spencer, Kayla Gunning, Gavin Hilary-Larsen, Ned Lansing, Earl O'Gramelkin, Chris Alfonso, literally all these people. Dana Burgess, Laura Stacey, and first-time question asked by Lauren Cooper, who asked what's the oldest shipwreck you've ever found and how pants-shittingly cool was it? But in general, how far back can we date them? Yeah, okay, so it depends on the wreck, definitely.

That annoying typical scientist answer depends. It depends. And we've got a lot of different materials at our disposal, like resources at our disposal to age them, and the one that everybody knows is carbon dating. We can carbon date shipwrecks, some of them. Depending on the age, you will decide how accurate that carbon date is,

but which is still super cool. Water typically doesn't affect our ability to carbon date, unless only part of the wood has been decomposed, like the organic matter. Sometimes you have conditions that the inorganic component of wood stays intact, and you're like, oh, this is awesome. I've got great wood. And it turns out all the organic matter is gone,

so you can't actually carbon date it very well. Quick aside, chemistry, fun fact. So organic matter has carbon, and C14 dating is only applicable to organic and some inorganic materials, but not applicable to metals. What? I didn't even realize that. But you can use it on things like wood, and bones, and leather, and pottery, and such.

Typically we can carbon date, but that's only one source that we'll use, because carbon dating has a pretty big error factor, like plus or minus so many years. And then plus you add on to that the fact that the carbon date is not the date that the ship sank. It's the date that the tree was cut down. So depending on where in the world the timber is from,

they have different methodologies for building ships, and for harvesting timber, you might have trees going into building a ship from 15 different seasons, like 15 different years. And then on top of that, you might have wood that sort of sits in a shipyard or gets seasoned for X number of years before it actually gets built,

and then the ship gets used for so many years before it actually sinks. So the date that you get might be 100 years before the date that it actually sank anyways. So then there's all these other methods that we use. And so one of the big things would be looking at what's actually on the shipwreck, the whatever was in the hull, the materials it was carrying.

So things like amphoras and bottles and coins all have very stylistic changes that are very unique to different places and time periods. And that's one way that we can track the age of a shipwreck. And then you get what I'm doing. So sea creatures, especially hard shelled sea creatures, grow at set rates, right? They've got sort of growth rings in their own shells.

And so this is called sclerochronology, and this isn't exactly what I'm doing, but it feeds into that. So if there's this idea that the coral reef or the ecosystem that's growing on the shipwreck can help indicate how long it's been there for, we can sort of back date it. So my site, I know it's only been there for 75 years.

I know that I have a rough estimate of the growth rate factors for all those organisms, you know, divided by 75 years. So maybe the wreck is 200 years old, but the coral is a spry 50. So she can find a shipwreck at a similar depth and compare notes on the living critters to get a rough estimate, kind of like a wreck detective.

A wreck detective. So you'll typically look at all these different factors as many as you can and crunch them together to figure out like, you know, where as much overlap as possible within all your different dates is. And then that gives you a more narrow time period for the ship's actual sinking.

Oh, that's some detective work. Yeah. Sclerochronologists are getting fewer. You should absolutely get an episode on that. I know. I was like, don't think that didn't lodge itself in my little brain. I was like, never heard of that one.

Because everybody knows about dendrochronology, which is super cool. But then this is like dendrochronology on living organisms, which is also super cool. Amazing. Annual growth rings. Who knew? Who knew?

OK. A lot of people had a question about what is the most interesting find on a shipwreck, in your opinion. So Amanda Chris says, first time question asker, long time listener, what is the most fascinating discovery or item on a shipwreck

and why is it the anti-Cathire mechanism? Yes. OK. Chef's kiss to you. I knew somebody was going to pass. So in Greece, you have a lot of like bigger islands, and then you have like a smaller island opposite it. And because they're part of the same municipality, like you don't give the smaller island its own name.

The island opposite that island. So that's where anti-Cathire gets its name from. Because it's opposite Cathire. So it's a smaller island just off the coast of Cathire, which is another island. So and that was where I mentioned the Parthenon marbles had sunk. So the anti-Cathire mechanism

is like often called the world's first computer. It's basically like four clocks. I think there was one that they think was every four years instead of every 12 hours. And so they speculated that it tracked the Olympics. I don't know the validity of that. But it also has like evidence that it might be linked to astrological

or astronomical dyslexics. So I get them confused. But so it was theoretically something that helped navigation. Because in order to track where you are at sea, you need to know the time and where you are. If you're looking at the night sky, if you're navigating via the sky,

you need to know the time because that's going to decide where in the night sky certain things are. And then so depending on it, the angles that they're at compared to the horizon. And if you know the time, you know how far you've traveled from your origin. So you get into like the quantum physics

of like knowing spacetime and everything else and how they figure it. Picture a box with brassy cogs and wheels and astrological symbols, but corroded and fused into one rocky blob. So after its discovery by some sponge divers in 1901, it sat around for a few years because no one really knew or cared

that this was possibly the first analog computer to predict eclipses and such. This was sunken on a vessel? Yes, there's a whole bunch of rumors behind it. I don't know how much of it we actually know for sure, but I know some theorize that it was a, because it was a Roman vessel. We know this and it was traveling through the Great Islands.

Some people think that it was like on its way to Julius Caesar. I don't know the validity of that. Some people also speculate that it was designed by like the father of trigonometry, the guy that came up with the first trigonometric tables, which sort of tracks if he's figuring out all this navigational stuff. I look this up.

It was a dude named Hipparchus from about 150 BCE, but yes, no one cared at first. And then they were like, oh, this is bananas. What is time? What is life? Would anyone like to buy a sponge? But yeah, so that's a very, very cool mechanism. That's cool because it's the only one that we've found like it

and it's sort of standalone in spacetime. The coolest things I think are always the things that show us about their daily lives. It's always going to be the things that you don't expect, but anything that tells you about the daily life. Because like as an archaeologist, we are interested in people's culture and like how they spend their time.

So absolutely, like whatever the captain has, whatever fine China he might have in his cabin is neat. But when you find gambling dice on a ship, like a shipwreck from a period and a time that you know that gambling was prohibited, that's pretty neat too. Yeah. Or like finding clay pipes.

It's like, oh my God, you find clay pipes everywhere, but it's like we now also understand why tobacco is still such a big thing today because it was like omnipresent in the past. Oh, and you know, a lot of people had questions in that realm. Like first time question asker, Dilettante Cosplay and Robo Shamblay and Emily Okerland, Natalie Rhodes, Rachel Kasha, Zoe Jane.

I love these questions. Sarah Crowder, they all wanted to know about eating things that have been jarred in a shipwreck. Like shipwreck wine and can you snack on stuff after bringing it up from the ocean floor? I don't know if you would want to with some of them. So like the really cool thing is, and like I would love to be able to try some like Roman wines.

It's like you see about these like Roman wines that they pull out of places in Pompeii and they extract the formula from the inside of the vessel, like the amphoras and stuff. We can do a lot of that with shipwreck materials because clay amphoras collect, like they absorb whatever's stored within them. We can do like thin section analysis

of the inside of these amphoras and figure out were they holding olive oil and then potentially even where that olive oil was actually from. Was it this famous fish sauce that was like a major trade item in the Roman Empire? Or was it wine? The thing is we can't actually try the actual wine because one of the biggest mysteries we still have

is how amphoras were actually corked or like sealed because these big clay jars are very heavy and they sink to the bottom. And so shipwrecks that had clay jars rather than barrels, like that's the thing. We think clay jars are very, very old and barrels are much more modern but there was overlap between the two

in terms of production and use. But shipwrecks with barrels don't preserve as well because they don't have the weight that pushes them into the sediment to protect them from organisms. And the barrels themselves then decompose. So it's like we have no clue what these shipwrecks were carrying if we do find them because the barrels are gone. But these amphoras we can actually figure out

if they were carrying like wine or oil or whatever. I don't think we have enough evidence from that to be able to recreate it because they get uncorked everything washes out. So literally all we have, we don't even have remains, all we have is like whatever tiny little amount was absorbed by the clay. Wow, that's so interesting.

I wasn't sure if they would just stay sealed. Yeah, well and that's something we don't know because like the theory is that they were somehow corked. Like there was some sort of piece of wood put on top and they were sealed with wax. And if that's the case, like the wood would theoretically decompose or maybe even get dislodged. Lots of them sort of crack.

You get like the necks cracked off. But yeah, it's like some people even theorize that it was just like waxed like oil cloth just tied around the neck. Not super secure in the turbulence of a sinking. That's like one of the biggest mysteries that we still have about the ancient world. It's like, how the heck did you seal these amphoras?

That's a super mundane question. I never knew they were the mason jars of yord. They weren't everywhere. Hipsters used them in seafaring bars. So like the funniest thing is that because like amphoras and the stamps, the designs that they had were like unique to different regions. And you've actually had people stealing the used ones

to make like counterfeit. So it's like olive oil from Greece was super expensive. So maybe you get like Spanish olive oil producers stealing the Greek olive oil like amphoras, putting their olive oil in it and then selling it for twice as much. Like shit like that went down a lot and was super poached. Yes.

Gosh, she got ripped off. Oh man. So we didn't know how these huge amphoras were sealed and also confession. I need to get off from a chest. I used to waitress at this bar restaurant and the owner would refill the tankeray with Gilby's gin, which is not good gin.

And we had one customer who could always tell and would make me crack open a fresh bottle for her. And I always wondered if she was like a bloodhound in a human costume or a secret spy. But then again, if you put Pepsi in a Coke bottle and you tried to pull that shit on me, I would call the FBI. And I've never told anyone until now

about that tankeray switch out because you know what they say, loose lips, sink ships. We got a lot of questions about my dad's favorite song, Megan Stingle, Gwen Zimmer, Vanessa Frye, Baloney Shoes, and Emily Stanisławski. And also I'm going to guess my dad, Mr. Larry Ward. Want to know, does everyone ask you about the Edmund Fitzgerald after finding that you study shipwrecks

because the song is already stuck in my head? Gwen wants to know, is it your favorite song? When supper time came, the old cook came on deck, saying, fellas, it's too rough to feed you. At 7 p.m., a main hatchway gave in. He said, fellas, it's been good to know you. So yes, how many times have you heard it? Many times.

I love Gordon Lightfoot. He was fantastic. Like one of the greats. Yes, it's a fantastic song. I'm terrible with the lyrics. So I had to actually like sit down one day and actually look at what was being said because I used to play like music

and I between playing instruments and being a dancer, I was like, I don't listen to lyrics. I like have all this other stuff going on my head. It was a fantastic song. And I think it's a great example of how broad and maritime culture is because like music is a huge part of it. When you look at sea shanties and whatnot,

it's basically a sea shanty. It's like a love song to a ship. So Gordon Lightfoot is a Canadian folk song hero and he wrote this in 1975 after seeing just a little blurb in the back of a Newsweek magazine about the Edmund Fitzgerald, which sunk in a November storm.

And Lightfoot recalled that they spelled Edmund rung in the article and he was just so sad that 29 lives, all crew members were lost, could amount to just a little afterthought in the news. So he wrote that diddy the next week and the world has remembered her ever since and the ship's victims remain with the wreck

in the cold, cold, cold waters of Lake Superior who they say never gives up her debt. It's cold enough that they stay pretty well preserved and wouldn't float up by decomposition. But the bell of the Edmund Fitzgerald has been retrieved at the behest of family members and has been rung in memorials, some of which Gordon Lightfoot has attended.

And he also set up a scholarship fund at Northwestern Michigan College where two crewmen were cadets. So yes, Grand Pod Ward, he has good sea song taste. And it's like, it's not even a ship from antiquity. It's like a freighter from the Great Lakes from what was 1875 or something like that. It's recent and I love that.

I love that it inspired somebody so much to create this absolute jam. It is, what a bop. It's a bop of maritime antiquity. Yes, it's fantastic. Yeah, I love any sort of sea shanties though, or just like any song about the sea is fantastic. It really makes me want to raise a mug of rum or something.

We got a lot of questions. Murray, Moss, Lungox, Rachel Selby, first-time question asker, Lisa Baik, Aspen, Felix LaSalle, Jacqueline Watson, Julie Nguyen, Kelsey Story, Katie, Kelly Hankin, Shelley Carr, All A Gog, Laura Stacey, Ira Gray, Benjamin, a lot of folks. Might even be missing some all listed on the side. Amesia Doles, Sam Kilgore, Adam Palick,

Sarah Fype, first-time askers, Luke, Samantha Norris, Paul Cirillo, and Alana Lytton. These folks all asked about ship critters and some more specifically. Want to know. Murray asks, what's the deal with shipworms? What are they? Lungox?

Not directly related to shipwrecks, but I'm very curious about shipworms. And Alisa Baik wants to know, do any wildlife and animals take advantage of a shipwreck? So, yes, tell us about what's limited them. So, so many animals and wildlife take advantage of them. So, depending on where in the water column a ship has settled, and depending on what material it is,

different organisms are going to be attracted to it. So, obviously, shipworms are more attracted to wooden shipwrecks. They're virtually going to leave metal ones alone. Because there's nothing for them to eat. Shipworms, what's the deal with them? They're not even fricking fracking worms. Like, start with that. They are the bane of most maritime archaeologists' existence.

So, yes, basically these mollusks, misnomerous to the extreme, I hate it, I love it, whatever. So, not worms. They originally lived in what's called the latoral zone, so close to shore. And so, basically, they would have feasted on not just ships. Obviously, it's not this organism that evolved just because of ships. They have, more recently, in the sense that

their distribution has broadened because of ships, because they were picked up from one area and deposited elsewhere. But they didn't come into being just because of ships. They just capitalized off of them. So, I mean, piers, anywhere like you've got here in California, you've got those beautiful piers out into the sunset with ferris wheels, shipworms, all over them. People have to replace those timbers,

anything that's in underwater, because of shipworms. Yes. What do they look like? Kind of a pale, flabby hose, to be honest, with a pair of bony castanets on one end that they use to rasp their way through things. And they also have some feathery, gill-like fancies at the other end. And they might be a meter long,

just a three-foot-long wood-boring dick bag. Wow. So, they are virtually everywhere throughout the world. The only places, like, the only waters that are immune to them, I will say, is at very high latitudes, so where it's too cold. And that is something that is changing with climate change, unfortunately. So, ships that used to be, like,

beautifully well-preserved wooden shipwrecks that used to be, like, we're like, yes, you guys are doing it, like, you're surviving the test of time. In, like, the North Atlantic, where I am, or the far south, we now need to actually monitor them and be careful about shipworms. And it's this whole thing like, what do we do if they do make it here? So, there's a few different things that you would do. It's like, shipworms don't, they need oxygen.

And that's why the Black Sea is actually one of the few places that's not super, super cold, that's immune to them. It's because you've got, like, a very thin layer of oxygenated water near the surface. And then below that, it's, like, super-anoxic. Anoxic? Not a lot of dissolved oxygen in the water. So, the worms just can't survive.

So, if a ship sinks quickly enough in the Black Sea, it won't be affected by shipworms, or it shouldn't, unless that also changes with climate change, which is possible. I'm not an expert. But, yeah, so, if we cover shipwrecks with at least, like, a few inches of sediment, they can't get accessed by these organisms. But slathering wrecks in sediment isn't a best-case scenario. And Chanel says that if something is still fairly intact,

with tall, pokey masts sticking up, you'd need meters and meters of mud to cover that. But what types of other critters and plants see a shipwreck and are just, like, lunch? Lots of organisms, like, their entire ecosystems. Anything that needs a hard substrate to settle off of loves a shipwreck. Because you've got what's sort of an ecological desert. You'll have whole swaths of the seafloor that's just silt and sand,

which has its own ecosystem. But none of these invertebrates that need this hard substrate, that need, like, you know, it's like putting down the foundation of a house. It's not really great in muddy water or, like, marshes. You need concrete sometimes. And then once these sort of reef ecosystems grow, bigger fish, reef fish, sharks, everything comes to it. Everything loves it.

It's great. I love that. I'm like, come, come, enjoy. And then that, like, goes back to humans, because, you know, a lot of times humans won't know why there's so much fish there, but local fishermen take advantage of that as well. Oh, that's interesting that you'll kind of know, well, there's something sunk around here,

which means there's got to be critters. Yeah. And that's sometimes, like, how we find out that there's a shipwreck. Like, if you talk to, like, local population, like local fishermen, you're like, so where do you fish? Like, oh, yeah, over here, there's always something hanging out. You're like, yeah, okay, wreck. Because, like, if you know that the topography there

is supposed to be 200 meters deep, there's got to be something attracting all those fish. It's a wreck, probably. Oh, my gosh, that's so fascinating. So the shipwrecks bring all the sharks to the yard. Now, what about the Bermuda Triangle? I feel like it's not fair to Bermuda to be mostly associated with all this drama.

And Patrons Monica, Elizabeth, Tyler Duggan, R.J. Earl of Gray-Milken, Ethan Bottone, Star, Kinsley Wheatley, Nicole Cujah, Chalice Decile Cagney, Happy Anniversary to you and Marcy. You kids grow up so fast. First-time question askers, Stacy Graves, Courtney Andrews, Maddie Raves, and Hannah Lee all want to know, in Hannah's words,

what do you think about the Bermuda Triangle and all the ships that have disappeared there? Is it a magnetic force or is it aliens? LOL. A bunch of people want to know what's up with the Bermuda Triangle. Is it really dangerous? I don't know. I have theories.

I want to say that most of the people that got lost there probably didn't know their way around and were relying on equipment that was not built for the area. Versus if you had a local who knows how to navigate atolls and rocky changes in topography and everything else, they probably wouldn't get lost. I like to entertain the idea of spookiness, so I read into it.

And this terrifying theory that the area between Miami Bermuda and Puerto Rico is a wreck magnet originated from a 1951 paranormal magazine. But experts say nope, it's just a heavily trafficked shipping lane with sometimes crappy weather. It would be like saying a freeway interchange in a snowy city is haunted by space goblins.

It's a fun way to live, but it's flim flam. Bruce has a great question. They ask treasure. Is it finders keepers? No, absolutely not. And that is a great question. Oh man, ownership of the past. So treasure finders keepers, absolutely not.

Because you really do have to ask who owns the past. A lot of shipwrecks from the 1600s onwards, depending on where they're coming from, we have really good records of who actually owned those ships. If we can determine what that wreck is, like we go back to the insurance company, like whoever put up the money to support that journey technically owns it.

If they don't, then more than likely it's the property of the crown, like whoever nation it was that sent it out. If not them, then it's the nation whose territory it falls within. If not them, then the nation of whoever's goods were on board. Oh wow. Yeah, so that becomes like when you've got these like Spanish doubloon cases found off the coast of Florida. A doubloon side note is a Spanish coin,

like what you might picture a treasure chest just filled with. They are shiny, they're typically around seven grams of gold and ornately stamped, and they can be worth thousands of dollars each. And it's speculated that the treasure coast of Florida is hiding 400 million dollars of these doubloons. And I just realized that if someone made a video game that was just called Florida, it would rip in every way. So much excitement.

But yes, who owns this booty? Like that because this huge international thing, because the US wants title to it and Spain wants title to it. So yeah, a lot of people in line to get any potentially sunk treasure before the divers stumble across it. I imagine there's got to be people who are like, let's not tell anyone about this. Yeah, sadly.

And I sort of hate social media for this because I see it a lot. Really? Yeah. Who's posting about it? Oh my gosh. So I and I try to be good about it. I try to be educational and not snobbish. And so this is one thing I will say if you are diving,

if you want to be a rec diver, something that they will not teach you in the courses, but which is your responsibility in my opinion is to know the laws around the area where you're going. Most rec divers are super awesome and they're very interested in history. I hate that there's this subset of rec divers who are so desensitized to it that they don't even think of recs as a piece of history. And that could be because a lot of times you train on scuttled recs,

so purposefully placed recs that you know are safe. So then they go to World War II recs in fantastic places like Hawaii and whatnot. And they don't realize like that's a war grave. Like even though the US doesn't have the same laws as Britain, like that's still someone's resting site. I've seen even like random fountain pen groups where somebody picked up a fountain pen off of a World War II rec site. And they're like, oh, my two passions combined.

I'm like, oh, leave it, leave it, please. Take pictures, believe it. Yeah. And they're like, oh, I kept it. I'm like, and that's the big thing too. And Super Nerd here, fountain pens have a lot of different materials incorporated into them. Lots of different types of metals, plastics. All of those components need specific conditions for conservation.

So you can't just throw the whole thing in like sterile water and just let it do its thing. Like each of those needs to be treated separately. So taking it out of that environment and putting it in your like on your office desk, it's going to fall apart pretty soon. So you're not helping anybody by taking it. It's tempting for sure. I know because everybody sees something like, oh, this is so cool.

I want a souvenir. It's like, please just take pictures. Yeah. Not to mention no one needs an extra ghost. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely not. I don't need a sailor ghost being like, why did you take my pen?

Why didn't you leave my pen? You know, I don't need a curse. Honestly, sometimes that'd be super awesome because I would love to have somebody to chat about. I'd love to like hear all their stories. But absolutely not. Don't need a curse. Don't need it.

Don't need it. 2020 was enough. I'm good. Stacey Graves, first time question asker, wants to know if there's anything unique about shipwrecks in the Great Lakes versus ones in the ocean. They're from Michigan and she says she knows there are a ton of shipwrecks here.

She's also heard about a Michigan triangle. What's up with the Great Lakes? Great Lakes represent. So I'm from Southern Ontario. So Great Lakes is like my closest big body of water. So the big thing is that it is pretty much its own sea. People that are not from the Great Lakes region hear about the Great Lakes and how many shipwrecks there are there

and they're like, what the heck dude? It's like a pond. I'm like, no, you can get massive swells. You can get horrible weather conditions. You like it's cold. I've dove on the east coast of Canada and I've dove in the Great Lakes and the Great Lakes can be colder at times

because it's like fresh water and thermodynamics is a thing. Fun fact. So fresh water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit but sea water freezes at about 28.4 because of the salts in it. Also because of the westerly wind in the Great Lakes and the displacement of lower colder water at the bottom of the lake. The west coasts of the Great Lakes

tend to be colder than the east coasts. So you're not imagining it. And yes, as we learned from the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald those Great Lake waters are not smooth sailing. They can have swells up to 40 feet high. It's rough conditions. Like it's a great place to learn to sail if you want to be a good sailor versus like sailing in Greece

where it's sunny and wonderful weather. I don't know about a Michigan triangle but absolutely tons of shipwrecks there. Another really cool thing about Great Lakes exploration and why there's so many shipwrecks there is because it was a lot of those shipwrecks are from a like period of transition. So we were switching from sail to steam.

We didn't just go straight to metal ships. We put steam engine like retrofitted sailboats with engines and oil furnaces and everything else. So when these shipwrecks sink they're so heavy that they sink very quickly and this improves their preservation. So it's part of why we see them longer and we think there's so many more.

It is a smaller area. So the like density of shipwrecks is smaller compared to like all the seas and oceans of the world. It didn't even occur to me until probably like 10 years ago that there were shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. Like I only consider them in the sea which is absolutely bananas. And yeah, then realizing that there were a lot of them

I think I came across one of those pictures in Clearwater you can see this sunken wreck. And it's like oh why is it so fascinating. And then on top of that shipworms can't survive there. So any wood shipwrecks that we do have are super well preserved because it is cold. It doesn't have the same sort of currents and like even metal shipwrecks can survive very well

in the Great Lakes because it's non-salty where like salt is worse for metal because it helps it corrode more quickly. So it's really good preservation conditions. So yeah, it's just like shipwreck on top of shipwreck and we just hear so many tales about it. So it seems like there's a heck of a lot and there are but yes, very, very cool area.

Olivia Meyer, first-time question asker, goes by Liv, asks what did a typical day look like and just in general for a maritime archaeologist, do you have any advice for people who want to get into this field? Okay, so you do not need to dive to be a maritime archaeologist. If you do dive and you want to be involved and even if you don't but you want to learn about it,

a great organization to look up is the Nautical Archaeology Society. It's based out of Portsmouth in England but they have, they run programs and they have sort of, I guess, offices all over the world and they have like a tiered education system. So you can do like the level one, it's literally called the level one, level two and level three. Their premise is to teach recreational divers

how to be helpful to archaeologists. So A, how to be good divers around archaeology and how to be potentially useful to be able to volunteer. Like teaches you the basic excavation and mapping skills. And the other thing that I would say to divers who want to dive near shipwrecks of any sort, if you don't want an archaeologist to hate you, basically have good buoyancy control

and have like, so there's something called trim in archaeology. So you basically want to be very streamlined. You don't want to have your arms hanging out from you dragging on the floor. You don't want your fins to be dragging on the sea floor because you typically want to be like two feet above, two, three feet above whatever you're looking at. And you don't want something to be hanging two feet off

and just like bashing into everything. So what is a typical day like for a maritime archaeologist? It can be spending a day in the archives, like looking at records from the 1500s of what ships went into quarantine when and like who contracted the plague and whatnot. Yeah, it can be a lot of grunt work. It can be a lot of carrying around tanks.

A lot of sitting at a computer, definitely. But yeah, every day can be different, which is fantastic, which is why I like it. Megan McLean had one other question. After getting scuba certified this year, they say I wanted to donate money to an organization that helps people of color have access to the sport and I found Diving With a Purpose.

Yes, love Diving With a Purpose. Whose goal is to provide education, training, and submerged heritage preservation and conservation projects worldwide with a focus on the African diaspora. Do you know anything more about how shipwrecks are connecting marginalized folks to their heritage, Megan asks.

Are there any ways that recreational scuba divers can help with preservation and science? But it sounds like that, that organization. Yeah, so NAS. Yeah, NAS is a great sort of learning body and then working with divers with a purpose or any other sort of other organizations is a great way. A lot of maritime, like especially

something that's close to shore, they'd be happy to, depending on the site, like depending on how sensitive the site is, if it's a military grave, maybe not. Happy to have volunteers. Typically just talk to people. Another fantastic organization, because Diving With a Purpose is amazing.

Another fantastic organization is Black Girls Dive and that's like a double whammy because Black people and people of color in primarily white places are stigmatized against these fields and women have this added difficulty because it's a very physical field a lot of time. The men that we might be around

might say that we don't deserve or shouldn't or can't be in those realms. So fantastic double whammy of an organization. Definitely shipwrecks are a huge way to reconnect with our heritage. It is a great tool that we have because indigenous cultures, typically around the world,

have a fantastic oral history. Their knowledge of locations, of potential wrecks, even those that aren't of their culture is so much better than sometimes what our written records might be in certain areas, especially in colonial regions. Indigenous cultures seem to have a lot less shipwrecks and I'm going to chop this up to being smaller ships

and also having better knowledge of the areas that they're navigating. So that says something about colonial practices in terms of knowledge of navigation and just like button themselves where they don't necessarily belong. I won't say anything more about indigenous populations because I don't know it and it's not my place.

But absolutely, I think a lot of people who... I mean, so I have somehow ended up working primarily with World War items and onwards and there's so many people that lost their lives on them that their grandkids never met, for example, and being able to work with those groups and reconnect them to a final resting place or just like, can you imagine never being able

to have seen your parents' grave? It's something. So that is like super meaningful in particular about minorities. I would say watch the enslaved docu-series. It's touching, it will make you cry and that is very much about the Black diaspora and looking at the slave ships that didn't make it to shore. More than 12 million Africans were enslaved and trafficked.

More than 2 million of our ancestors died in sea. The ocean holds stories that haven't been told. So definitely watch that film instead of an ancient aliens episode about like the lost mythical city of Atlantis. I'm honestly impressed there hasn't been an Atlantis question yet because that's normally like my biggest rant. I'm, wait, hold on, let me see if I missed it, Atlantis. Let me see.

Okay, three people asked about the Atlantis. Okay, I have, thank you. I have, thank you. You have restored some faith in humanity that like it's not on everybody's mind. Ashley E wants to know what's the deal with Doggerland? Is it the real Atlantis? Sarah Hunt says how realistic is the science and history and engineering shipwrecks of the animated Atlantis film?

And Bella Treza, first-time question asker, do you entertain theories of the Bermuda Triangle or Atlantis or other fun nautical conspiracies? So yeah, Atlantis, let's talk about it. I hate it. I love that. I love the animated movie. I have to admit, I have not seen it in like 15 years and I really should.

So I can't say how accurate any of the engineering is. But if I remember correctly, it was like super sci-fi, like super steampunk. And so I don't feel like it's super accurate. Now we've all heard of a legend of Atlantis. Pure fantasy. Well, that is where you be wrong. That young fact gets crazier every year. I can prove Atlantis exists.

I'm sure of it this time. But yeah, honestly, Atlantis is probably my biggest pet peeve. As a young person that's on social media, this isn't a thing that only I get. But when people slide into your DMs type thing, they see maritime archaeologists and they go, so tell me about Atlantis. And they think that that's going to intrigue me.

I'm like, no. Or they ask me if I'm just a treasure hunter. I'm like, no. Oh, geez. The lock. Yeah, Atlantis probably doesn't exist. And people like to say like, oh, but every myth has some proof. So I have to stress,

Atlantis, there's one actual record of Atlantis existing. And it was from a Plato fable. So something that he openly admitted was like fiction. It's not like a recount of some war. It's like his fables were very well known to be fiction. They were supposed to be narratives that people could learn from. And so the whole theory was that this Poseidon worshiping city angered Poseidon somehow and was dashed,

like destroyed and sent into the abyss. There's no mention in a Plato story of people actually living underwater. Like it's just not there. So to me, like people still get fascinated about like these big topics. Like Atlantis and Titanic. And it's painful to me that there's so much money going into it. Just go to Discovery Channel or History Channel and like look at how many finding Atlantis, Atlantis resurface.

Like so many, like how many times can we find this place? And I'm like, just invest that money somewhere else. There's indigenous cultures. There's, you know, vanishing seaside communities. There's like traditional boat building techniques that one person in an entire country still practice. That's where we can invest that money. I'm like, it's so damaging to other cultures to be fixated

on these super charismatic, possibly fake or overstudied sites. I'm sorry to anybody whose dreams I dashed. No, I think it's good. I think that this is necessary flimflam that needed debunking. Yes, please stop sending me messages about it, random people who I don't know. Okay, so that is one of the most difficult things about your job. What's another thing that is difficult or petty anything? Anything that sucks.

The smells. Can you say that? Like people are going to hear this and think like, wow, what a girl. But no, it's like it's such a pungent profession. Sometimes it's wonderful, like old books smell amazing. But like, okay, I've been on research festivals with guys like predominantly male crews who are just working for eight hours a day. Like cause I was on a site that was over a hundred meters deep

and the guys were excavating and then they were coming back up. And so they dive in these dry suits. So like you're like sweating inside of it. It's quite warm and they're in a wetsuit. You know, your water flushes you out and it doesn't do that. So your sweat musk just lingers. So, you know, then you open up the suit. It's like, wow.

And like the thermal stuff that you wear underneath takes ages to dry. So if you're diving every day, you're not washing your thermals until like you're done diving. One site I was on was like really close to a landfill. So if you surfaced and like you've just been breathing out of a bottle for four hours and now you surfaced and the wind hits you just right, you're like, yum. Probably the worst. So this deep wreck where I was working with the people that were diving in dry suits,

I was working on the material that was surfaced from the year before. So because it's so deep, you don't excavate the way that you would on land. Like you don't look for artifacts as you go. They basically were just like shoving everything in the hose, vacuuming it into this ginormous vacuum bag that holds like tons of sand. And then on land, we like sifted out later. And because we didn't know how small the stuff we were going to find is. So I actually found this tiny little piece of wood,

which was the first piece of wood we'd found on that shipwreck. So super exciting. And because we found this pretty small piece of wood, they're like, okay, start looking for like olive pits or grape seeds and all this other stuff. So we're like literally taking sand between our hands and rubbing it to make sure we don't miss anything. And I came across this sand covered bundle of slime. I have no clue what it was.

I would guess like anaerobically decomposed because of the smell. My supervisor, he's like, just, just smush it. You can't, you can't like just sort of like, you need to make sure there's nothing in there. Because it was like this, like heft of some sort of slime. And it smelled so bad. Like I washed my hands so many times and it still smelled bad. I went home and I covered my hands in toothpaste.

And they still smelled. That's probably the worst. Oh, what did it smell like? I can't even like really, really, really bad like sulfur farts. Like cause there was like methane. I'm pretty sure because that's why I think it was anaerobic. Cause I could definitely smell like the methane-y sulfur-y part. But plus like an overtone of fishy,

plus something that had been sitting out in the sun for like months because this had been in the sun for so long. Like that's the thing. It was in this big pile of sand in the sun for like months and it hadn't dried out. There was no like skeleton. There was no like scales. It wasn't like a dead fish. It was just slime.

So I have no clue what it was. Oh, God. Like I don't know, a dead squid maybe? Maybe. I don't know. Sea snot. It was just a ball of free-floating ocean. There's no tag fish there.

So I don't know. But yes, oh my gosh, it was so gross. Oh God. So what is your favorite thing about maritime archaeology? So two things, I guess, because I definitely love being around the sea and like even just getting to look at videos from like marine life. I pretty much am doing my dream that I had as a kid. So that is like the best thing ever.

But then the other thing is getting to work with communities and giving back to them because I did get to sit with someone while they saw the shipwreck that their grandfather had died on, which was a submarine wreck. Like for the first time, first time it'd been seen in 75 years. That is amazing. And getting to do Skype as a scientist, like getting to actually make something accessible to people where it's,

most people aren't divers. Most people can't travel to fancy locations and dive on this on history. I'm actually working on a project to make sites like accessible to people who don't have the typical abilities to see it. So like the visually impaired is my primary focus. Everybody's response is like, okay, we've got 3D models. It's like, okay, we'll cope it.

We can't go to museums. We can't hold these 3D models. So everybody's putting things online, but if you can't see these shipwreck images, that doesn't help you. So getting to work with those communities and fill in those gaps is probably the best. Oh, wow. I think that's so amazing.

Like I just, I know that you have a very long career ahead of you. Fingers crossed. So ask maritime scholars do fee questions because chances are they dedicated their life to this stuff because they actually like talking about it. So you have nothing loose. Also follow Chanel Zafiropoulos at Sharks and Rex on Twitter. She's also at Sharks and Rex on Instagram.

Her website is linked in the show notes too. And she sells beautiful postcards of her photography there. I'm just going to plug it because she didn't. And I think her photography is beautiful. There's links to all those in the show notes. We are at oligies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Ali Ward with one L on both. If you want to join our Patreon, it's at patreon.com slash oligies.

Thank you, Erin Talbert for managing the oligies podcast Facebook group. Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch Handle merch. Emily White of the Wardery does transcripts. Caleb Patton bleeps them to make them kid safe. Those are up at a link in the show notes as well. Susan Hale has been making those awesome quizzes you're seeing on Instagram. Noelle Dilworth helps with scheduling my whole life and more. Jared Sleeper is handsome and also assistant edits alongside the myth

and the legend Stephen Ray Morris. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, you know, I tell you a secret. And this week's secret is that I have started to do science consultation on a new kids show for HBO. And I was on a zoom that was pretty intense discussing curriculum for children and the intersection of entertainment and learning.

And the people on the call were psychologists who worked on Sesame Street and all kinds of shows. And I was in my office that I'd share with my fiance, Jared. And Jared farted so loud, like a cartoon or like a whoopee cushion that was a human being. And I don't know if my facial expression gave away that that was my audio, but he was off camera. So there's a good chance they didn't even know it wasn't me. And 15 minutes later, I got off the call.

I left so hard. And Jared said that he just didn't know that wasn't going to happen. And the most shocking thing about it is that it took over a year to have a truly mortifying zoom moment. But I think it was worth it. I'm sure we've all had him at some point, right? You're not alone. Okay, smooth sailing.

Happy travels. Get the vaccine. If you can, we are not out of this storm yet. Chin up. Masks on. We got this. Okay, bye-bye. Zoology.

Litology. Nanotechnology. Meteorology. Nefectology. Nephology. Cereology. Cellulogy.