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Off the coast of the Black Sea in the Mykolaiv region, archaeologists have discovered a sunken ancient Greek shipwreck dating back more than 2.5 thousand years. The ship, discovered during a joint expedition of the Institute of Archaeology of NAS of Ukraine and the Warsaw Institute of Archaeology, is believed to be one of the oldest of its kind discovered in the region. According to the head of the black sea international underwater archaeological expedition, Vyacheslav Gerasimov, it may have possibly sailed ancient trade routes to Olbia or Chersonesos. “This ship is one of the oldest known in the Northern...

........[The] SS Robert E. Lee was carrying survivors from sister ships torpedoed in the Gulf, from Trinidad to New Orleans. On the June 30,1942, as it reached just 25 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River, a German torpedo hit. According to historical accounts, a lookout spotted the torpedo coming in and alerted the steamer's escort, the American submarine chaser USS PC-566. The sub immediately began dropping depth charges. The German U-boat, U-166, which launched the attack, was sunk with no survivors. Its wreck cannot be disturbed, now protected as a war grave for the 52 crew lost. On...

Ocean explorer Robert Ballard, who is responsible for the discovery of the Titanic shipwreck, says he may have discovered evidence of the Great Flood described in the Book of Genesis. Ballard is now on a mission to find evidence that the "mother of all floods" actually occurred, he told Christiane Amanpour of ABC News. "We went in there to look for the flood," he told ABC News. "Not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed... The land that went under stayed under." The explorer's mission was prompted by research conducted...

Archaeologists have found evidence that appears to support the theory that a catastrophic flood struck the Black Sea region more than 7,000 years ago, turning the sea saline, submerging surrounding plains and possibly inspiring the flood legends of Mesopotamia and the Bible. In their first scientific report, the expedition leaders said that a sonar survey conducted in the summer of 2000 in the sea off Sinop, a city on the northern coast of Turkey, revealed the first distinct traces of the preflood shoreline, now about 500 feet under water. At one site, the sonar detected more than 30 stone blocks ...

The movement of 37 sunken vessels... unearthed during excavations carried out as part of the Istanbul Marmaray and metro projects, has finally been concluded. The head of Istanbul University’s Department of Marine Archaeology and the Yenikapı Sunken Ships Project, Associate Professor Ufuk Kocabaş, said works had continued for eight years. He added that the structures and tens of thousands of archaeological artifacts found in Theodosis Port, one of the most important ports in the city in the Middle Ages, represented the largest Middle Ages boat collection in the world. Kocabaş said scientific works were still ongoing on the sunken ships...

The excavations started in 2004 at the construction site and reached back 8,500 years into the history of Istanbul. Skeletons, the remains of an early chapel and even footprints, in addition to 35 shipwrecks, have been uncovered by archaeologists so far. The ship was loaded with pickled fry (a type of small fish) and almonds, walnuts, hazels, muskmelon seeds, olives, peaches and pine cones The 15 to 16-metre-long, six-metre-wide shipwreck loaded with dozens of amphorae found last May brings new historical data to life. The amphorae differ from previous finds. It is assumed that the ship was completely buried in...

Human skeletons, which experts say could be more than 8,000 years old, were found in four prehistoric graves recently unearthed at the Marmaray tunnel excavation site in the Yenikapı district of Istanbul. These graves reveal Istanbul used to be home to some of the earliest types of settlements during the Stone Age when people migrated from Anatolia to the European continent,� said Mehmet Özdoğan, professor of prehistory at Istanbul University. �They also show that the Marmara Sea used to be a small and shallow water in ancient times. Özdoğan said the graves, two of which were smaller than the others,...

It seems a typical scene of urban decay: abandoned buildings, crumbling walls, trash and broken wine bottles. Yet it's more than 1,500 years old. Engineers uncovered these ruins of an ancient Byzantine port during drilling for a huge underground rail tunnel. Like Romans, Athenians and residents of other great historic cities, the people of Istanbul can hardly put a shovel in the ground without digging up something important. But the ancient port uncovered last November in the Yenikapi neighborhood is of a different scale: It has grown into the largest archaeological dig in Istanbul's history, and the port's extent is...

Workers digging a railway tunnel under the Bosporus Strait have uncovered the remains of a major Byzantine harbor that archaeologists say is a trove of relics dating back to Roman Emperor Constantine the Great. The deepest underwater rail tunnel in the world will link Istanbul's Asian and European halves and ease bridge traffic across the Bosporus Strait. It may also be delayed by excited archaeologists. The tunnel, when it's finished, will end in a shining new railway station, the largest in Turkey -- a train and subway link surrounded by a 21st-century shopping center. Modern Turkish planners, though, weren't the...

Treasure dig threatens Bosphorus rail link By Sarah Rainsford BBC News, Istanbul The port has been uncovered at the site designated for a railway hub It's been called the project of the century: a mission to connect two continents with a $2.6bn rail-tunnel running deep beneath the Bosphorus Straits. The idea of linking the two sides of Istanbul underwater was first dreamt of by Sultan Abdul Mecit 150 years ago. See how the tunnel will cross the Bosphorus Now that Ottoman dream is finally being realised. But the modern version of that vision has hit a historical stumbling block. Istanbul...

Nautical archaeology takes a leap forward For centuries the harbour of Ancient Constantinople, modern Istanbul, was the inlet of the Golden Horn, running north between the peninsula on which the city’s core stands and the commercial and foreign quarter of Galata and Pera to the east. A boom across the inlet protected the city from attack, although the Ottoman troops of Mehmet II stormed across the Golden Horn in 1453 to end the Byzantine Empire. A second, mainly commercial, harbour, in use from the 5th-10th centuries AD, has been found on the south shore of the peninsula, on the Sea...

WASHINGTON - Undersea explorer Robert Ballard leans back and smiles at the screens arrayed above his desk. One displays a view of a remote operating vessel, another scans along a seafloor never before viewed by humans. It's the Black Sea, not far from Ukraine, a region long closed to outsiders and now yielding a treasure trove of Byzantine vessels that met their ends 1,000 or more years ago. For Ballard the archaeologist, those vessels and their contents are a delight. For Ballard the explorer, the modern technology he's testing for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is pretty exciting, too....

HONOLULU, Aug. 28 — Researchers said Wednesday they found a Japanese midget submarine sunk more than an hour before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Discovery of the 78-foot vessel could provide the first physical evidence to back U.S. military assertions that it fired first against Japan in World War II and inflicted the first casualties.>p> THE SUB was sunk by a Navy destroyer on Dec. 7, 1941. Two Japanese crewmen are believed still inside the submarine. “It’s the shot that started World War II between the Americans and the Japanese,” said John Wiltshire, associate director of the Hawaii Undersea Research...

Foley, a marine archaeologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and his colleagues at Greece's Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities in Athens have spent the day diving near the cliffs of the tiny island of Dia in the eastern Mediterranean. They have identified two clusters of pottery dating from the first century BC and fifth century AD. Together with other remains that the team has discovered on the island's submerged slopes, the pots reveal that for centuries Greek, Roman and Byzantine traders used Dia as a refuge during storms, when they couldn't safely reach Crete. It is a nice...

The Persian Wars may be famed in history, but few artifacts and material remains have emerged to shed light on how the ancient Greeks defeated the Asian invaders and saved Europe in what scholars call one of the first great victories of freedom over tyranny. It is well known that a deadly warship of antiquity, the trireme, a fast galley powered by three banks of rowers pulling up to 200 oars, played a crucial role in the fierce battles. Its bronze ram could smash enemy ships, and armed soldiers could leap aboard a foe's vessel in hand-to-hand combat with...

Archaeologists explore ocean floor for clues to early coastal settlement by Cindy Weiss - April 23, 2007 Anthropologists in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences are identifying new sites to study archaeology that are fathoms, not feet, under the surface. Anthropology professor Kevin McBride and doctoral candidate David Robinson are scoping out early coastal human settlement sites, now under water, that could reveal clues to how the Americas were settled. McBride says early submerged sites may yield evidence of how the earliest coastal residents lived and how they got here. McBride, who is also director of research at the...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. July 30, 2004 — Four years ago, scientists thought they had found the perfect place to settle the Noah flood debate: A farmer's house on a bluff overlooking the Black Sea built about 7,500 years ago just before tidal waves inundated the homestead, submerged miles of coastline and turned the freshwater lake into a salty sea. Some believed the rectangular site of stones and wood could help solve the age-old question of whether the Black Sea's flooding was the event recounted in the Biblical story of Noah. That story told of a calamitous flood occurring over 40 days...

The coasts of Anatolia are sprinkled with ancient cities whose harbours bustled with ships engaged in the thriving sea trade of the Aegean and Mediterranean. But not every ship made it safely to harbour. Many were wrecked in storms and sank with their cargoes to the seabed, and the remains of these have lain hidden on the seabed for long centuries. Wrecks of both merchant and warships each have their historical tale to relate, and are among the underwater sights that fascinate divers today. No other region of the world is so rich in sunken history as the seas around...

Buried beneath shells, rocks and sand, for 2,600 years, ...a treasure of incalculable value has lain just off La Manga...The find appears to be the cargo of a commercial ship carrying ivory from African elephants, amber and lots of ceramic objects. The find has been kept secret for the past three years by the team of divers led by the Spaniard Juan Pinedo Reyes and the American Mark Edward Polzer. The recovery project is being financed by National Geographic, who have reached an agreement with the Spanish Minister of Culture, the Institute of Nautical Archaeology and the University A&M of...

Nautical Research Group has returned from a highly successful scientific research expedition to RMS Titanic. In the course of processing the high quality digital video shot on Titanic last week, two startling observations of note were discovered. Preliminary findings have revealed that Titanic is in an advanced state of deterioration and some data may provide new clues to how she broke up near the surface. The first significant observation was that the mast has finally collapsed in the area above the bell stanchion. In a recent scientific article that Nautical Research Group president, David Bright will present at Oceans 2005,...