[Always A Marine]

Let’s be realistic. If these shipwrecks and war graves dated back a few thousand years instead of only seven decades, we’d strip them bare and our museums wouldn’t call it looting. Somehow it’s OK when the right people do it.

[nickcarraway]

I do think recovering things for the enrichment of human knowledge is different than looting.

[CodeToad]

Exactly. Let rich museum snobs take the artifacts and charge admission to see them and all is well. Let someone else take them and it is looting. Good chance it is going to a museum anyway.

[Alberta's Child]

There’s also the basic dilemma of having shipwrecks in international waters outside the jurisdiction of any nation — including the nations that owned these sunken ships. The article cites examples of two British warships that were sunk 80 years ago off Malaysia — 7,000 miles away from Great Britain. Great Britain doesn’t have some kind of territorial claim to a patch of the Pacific Ocean just because they owned two warships that are now sunk there.

I wouldn’t even use the term “looting” to describe what’s going on there. If scavengers can recover pieces or wreckage from a shipwreck that’s 150 feet underwater, then the Royal Navy could have done it themselves at any time over the last 80 years. They obviously didn’t think it was something terribly important to their country over all that time.

[tbw2]

The ironic thing is that the demand for steel made before we started exploding nukes in the atmosphere is DRIVING demand for WW2 shipwreck steel.