[zeestephen]

Now, back to the topic....

Not long ago, I read that the water at the bottom of the Black Sea is almost completely devoid of oxygen, and Black Sea shipwrecks are often in pristine condition, but, unfortunately, very little marine archeology has been conducted there.

Were the shipwrecks in your post found off Turkey’s Black Sea coastline or off the Mediterranean coast?

[SunkenCiv]

Willard Bascom was still alive when Robert Ballard started his survey in the Black Sea. They did a quick run to identify potential sites for close-up investigation, and went back after they’d done the job for which they’d been paid. He used the same approach to look for and find the Titanic (under contract to the Pentagon to find a lost nuclear sub), and later to survey the eastern Med off Israel (under contract, looking for a lost sub) and found some Phoenician wrecks.

Bascom was Ballard’s mentor and alas, passed to the afterlife a few days before the team found the wreck. In the National Geographic show about Ballard’s search for Noah’s Flood, Ballard read the intro from Bascom’s long-ago book on underwater archaeology. Wish I could find the dang thing online, it’s electrifying. Bascom imagined a wreck with its mast still upright, setting on the bottom, down in the anoxic layer — and that’s exactly what they found.

The big news of course was that Ballard had found Noah’s farmhouse or something, and he’s spent nearly 15 years correcting that misconception.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0105/feature3/

[SunkenCiv]

This is from a later expedition and show:

[SunkenCiv]

Secrets Of The Dead - Quest For Noah's Flood:

[SunkenCiv]

Deep Water, Ancient Ships — The Treasure Vault of the Mediterranean
by Willard Bascom
http://www.alibris.com/Deep-Water-Ancient-Ships-The-Treasure-Vault-of-the-Mediterranean-Willard-Bascom/book/1542208

ah, found it on the drive:

“It sits upright on the bottom, lightly covered by the sea dust of 2,500 years,” he wrote. “The wave-smashed deckhouse and splintered bulwarks tell of the violence of its last struggle with the sea. A stub of a mast still remains.”

and the original link was in the file:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0105/feature3/assignment1.html