Ologies with Alie Ward - Smologies #24: SHIPWRECKS with Chanelle Zaphiropoulos

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

Ahoy matey, we’ve we’ve brought ye another ensmol’d episode of Ologies (which just means cleaned of filth and cut for brevity) this time on: Shipwrecks. We get to talk with maritime archaeologist and wreck nerd Chanelle Zaphiropoulos about her experiences with Shipwrecks, treasure, carbon dating, admirals worth admiring, ancient technology recovered from the depths of history, The Bermuda Triangle, and generally life as an underwater wreck detective.Follow Chanelle on Twitter and InstagramA donation went to Diving with a PurposeFull-length (*not* G-rated) Maritime Archaeology episode + tons of science linksMore kid-friendly Smologies episodes!Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray Morris, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, and Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaMade possible by work from Noel Dilworth, Susan Hale, Kelly R. Dwyer, Emily White, & Erin TalbertSmologies theme song by Harold Malcolm

Oh, hi, welcome to Smaller Gs. What are Smaller Gs? Okay, so these are shorter, kid-friendly versions of classic episodes. So we took them and we took all the swears out. Nothing too racy. You can listen around kids. You can listen around your grandparents, perhaps work colleagues, whatever. If you want the full length version of this episode, though, of course it's going to be

linked in the show notes. We also have more Smaller Gs up at alleyword.com. Slash Smaller Gs. Okay, enjoy. Oh, hey, it's your wallet. We also have more Smologies up at alliword.com slash Smologies. Okay, enjoy. Oh, hey, it's your wallet, which if I'm so important to you, why do you lose me all the time? Alliword back with a watery historical episode of allegies. I've wanted to do this episode for so long. Truth be told, I would love to revisit this allegy 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 thisologist is an allergite 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. 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. Okay, so maritime archaeology. Maritime archaeology comes from Maure, which means sea and 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, the brimita triangle, Atlantis, her favorite ship captain of all time, your new favorite ship captain, and the life that blooms around tragedy. So, batten down your hatches and share your Archaeologist Chanel Zafferopolis. No, she's a shipwreck expert.

My name is Chanel Zaforopolis or Zap, whatever is easier. And she, her. Do you get seasick? I'm going to guess no. I've been seasick twice and once I'm pretty sure with speed poisoning. Ships away, let's go. Can you tell me a little bit about what maritime archaeologists do? Are they collecting samples?

Do they raise the ships off of the sea floor? Or is that very verbodar? I mean, it's like, keep it there. You're going to hate me, but I'm going to say it depends. Very classic. It's a bit of a serious 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 resurfaced, the Mary Rose, the Vassas, a big one. Just a quick aside, some cliff notes, the Mary Rose was a 16th century English tutor worship that capsized off the Isle of Wright and was raised up in the 1970s. And the Vassa is a Swedish worship 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. There are a lot of conservation issues, even if you manage to raise the funds to raise the ship. 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, okay, maybe you can surface it. Some have a negative impact. And so you're like, yes, do surface it. And then some is just, 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, 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 a 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. Sunken treasure. Did one person find sunken treasure one time and then everyone's like bunch of ships out there, we scrolled on it. Or was that an actual thing where their banks were like in the hole? I wish I knew. I wish I knew more about pirates and whatnot. I know a lot more people. Corsairs than I do about pirates. What's a corsair?

So 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. Yeah, 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 gonna 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. 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 its Florida and its pirate treasure. 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 question. Studying shipwrecks themselves, it's happened for a while. Like, we've been doing it in some way, cheaper 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 waste to explore underwater before self-contained underwater breathing apparatus was a thing. It was very limited. Definitely sonar makes it so much easier to locate things.

Now sonar, as we know, it came about after 1918. It was developed around World War I, but some early uses are said to be in the 1400s. When Leonardo da Vinci screamed into an underwater tube, but back on topic. Communications, I would say, is the other big thing. We know where that tight-handed 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, okay, 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. Okay, 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 tried to figure that out. We don't.

Okay, 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, 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. Hey, 2023 Allie here. And with the recent shipwreck news, I thought this might be a good place to chime in about something that comes up a lot when we talk about being down where it's wetter, down where it's better under the sea, and that is pressure. Okay, so think about how heavy a pitcher of water is, right? Which is probably less than a single gallon. Now the deeper you go in the ocean, the more water is above you and around you and all that water has a lot of weight. So the deeper you go, the more weight is pressing on you and the more pressure you feel.

And pressure can be measured in what's called atmospheres. So one atmospheres measures 14.6 pounds per square inch. And that's the amount of pressure we experience at the surface level of the earth from air just walking around living our lives. For every 10 meters below the surface of the water, the pressure increases by one atmosphere. And we can figure out how many atmospheres of pressure are at a given depth with some really simple division.

So we take the depth of the meters, and let's say the deepest person can dive is a thousand feet. That's about 300 meters. So we divide that number by 10. So 300 divided by 10 is 30 atmospheres of pressure. So can you figure out how many atmospheres of pressure you'd feel at the bottom of the ocean where the Titanic is, which is 12,600 feet underwater, you can divide that by 10, but don't forget to convert to meters first. So convert it to meters by dividing by three, and then divide that by 10.

Okay, did you get it? Cool. Most shipwrecks, do they happen because of whether running around icebergs, what is thinking most of these vessels? Depends. So in some parts of the world icebergs are definitely more concerned than they are in other parts of the world. Newfoundland, what I did my undergrad definitely has a lot more concern with icebergs. 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 have them the fog is. 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. Something to say too. Really? It goes down. Yeah. If you think back to when ships had masks, when ship goes down because you navigated wrong or whether 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. I have so many questions from listeners. There's so many, and there are such good questions. Can I lob some patron questions at you in a lightning round? Yes, absolutely. Okay. But before we do a quick word about sponsors of the show, they let us donate to a good cause each week, initial 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 trained 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 of allergies. Okay, back to underwater nautical inquisition. A lot of folks all wanted to know, 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? She's super cool. Oh yeah, it's not like when a flight goes missing, you've got the black box 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. And like the label 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 maybe. Her name is Lascarina Bubalina.

And she fought during the Greek war of independence. Admiral Lascarina Bubalina. 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 worship 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. Part of me is like I would love to find any wreck that's associated with her. Probably not gonna 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 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 parts of the Caribbean? No. Yeah, sure. Yeah.

A ton of people asked about age of shipwrecks, like how far back can we date them? Yeah, okay. So it depends on the wreck, definitely. That annoying, typical scientist answer depends. Okay. 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. 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

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 like 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. 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- 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 spray 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 rec detective. A rec 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 syncing. Oh, that's some detective work. Okay, 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-cathier or a mechanism? Yes, okay, Chef's kiss to you. I knew somebody was gonna pass it. So the anti-cathier mechanism is like often called the world's first computer. Yeah, 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 might be linked to astrological or astronomical dyslexic, 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 so depending on 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 space time and everything else. How they think you're this. 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. But yeah, so that's a very, very cool mechanism. That's cool because it's the only one that we found

like it and it's sort of standalone in space and time. 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. Now, what about the Bermuda Triangle? I feel like it's not fair to Bermuda to be mostly associated with all this drama. 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? Hell no. Is it really dangerous? I don't know.

I have theories. I like to entertain the idea of spookiness, so I write 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 the 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. Bella Treza, first time question I'll ask her, 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. Hello, fat. I hate it. Yeah, Atlantis probably doesn't exist. Let's talk about it. I hate it. Hello, fat. 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 more. 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, I destroyed and sent into the abyss. There's no mention in a Play-Doh story of people actually living underwater. Like it's just not there. I'm sorry to anybody who was dreams I dashed.

No, I think it's good. I think that this is necessary flim flam that needed debunking. So what is your favorite thing about maritime archaeology? So two things, I guess. Because I definitely love being around the sea and even just getting to look at videos from marine life.

I pretty much am doing my dream that I had as a kid. So that is 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. Like that is amazing. And getting to do Skype of Science is like getting to actually make something accessible to people is probably the best. No. So ask aquatic experts great questions, such as, what are you doing?

And you'll get some really fascinating stories. And if you want more smallages, you can find them at alliword.com slash smallages. There are tons of episodes. They're all kids safe, classroom safe, with experts. We are at alleg allergies on Instagram and Twitter. I'm at Alie Word with one L on both. Thank you Zechroud Riegas Thomas, Jared Sleeper of Mind Jam Media and Mercedes-Mateland of Mateland Audio for working on these. We

like to keep these small and short so you'll find a whole list of credits in the show notes. Thank you for listening and pass them on and at the end of the episode, if you listen all the way here, I give you a piece of advice. And today's piece of advice is that I am recording this literally as I'm driving through

a rather writing in the passenger seat of downtown Philadelphia, and I'm here for a conference. And I'm recording these now because this is when I have time to do it. And sometimes done is better than perfect. So better to do something when you can do it, then put it off hoping it'll be perfect

because done is better than perfect. So remember that next time you're intimidated by something. Okay, bye bye. I'm just... I'm just... I'm just...