Posted on 02/09/2013 4:57:18 PM PST by SunkenCiv
A dive to the undersea cliff where a famous Roman shipwreck rests has turned up either evidence that the wreck is enormous -- or a suggestion that, not one, but two sunken ships are resting off the Greek island of Antikythera...
The Antikythera wreck is famed for the massive number of artifacts pulled from the site over the past century. First discovered in the early 1900s by local sponge divers, the wreck is most famous for the Antikythera mechanism, a complex bronze gear device used to calculate astronomical positions (and perhaps the timing of the Olympic games). Numerous bronze and marble statues, jars and figurines have also been pulled from the wreck. The ship went down in the first century B.C...
The wreck is perched on a steep undersea cliff in water too deep for standard scuba gear. The undersea landscape also makes deploying remotely operated submersibles impossible, Foley said. In 1976, Jacques Costeau led a diving expedition to the site. Since then, it has been unexplored, thanks in part to its remote location in the strait between Crete and Peloponnese...
Intact artifacts from the wreck were spread over a huge area, about 197 feet (60 meters) long at depths ranging from 114 feet to 197 feet (35 to 60 m), Foley said. That's large for an ancient shipwreck, Foley said, suggesting either a huge ship or perhaps more than one wreck. The findings are preliminary, Foley said, but the team may have ultimately been excavating 984 feet (300 m) away from the site explored by Cousteau. If that's the case, he said, they may have found a separate wreck -- likely part of the same fleet as the original wreck that went down in the same storm.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Here a researcher examines the anchor of what may be the Antikythera wreck or another wreck nearby. They are uncertain because they used Costeau's Antikythera expedition videos to gauge where to anchor their boat. Since some of the shots in the video were almost certainly staged, the researchers can't be sure they weren't diving at a site hundreds of yards away from the site explored in 1976. -- CREDIT: Hellenic Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities and WHOI
collision? :p
Psst! Don’t tell anyone, but I posted a much earlier topic about this renewed study of the site, and it was *months ago*.
I hope no one clicks on the “antikythera” or “antikytheramechanism” keywords, either.
Return to Antikythera: Divers revisit wreck where ancient computer found
Guardian UK | Tuesday 2 October 2012 | Jo Marchant
Posted on 10/04/2012 5:39:19 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2940389/posts
It’s two, two, two wrecks in one.
This reminds me of a wreck site, I think it was off one of the Aegean islands near Turkey — there was a sandwich where a comparatively modern vessel was on top, an ancient vessel beneath, and under that, a more ancient vessel. Each ship had hit the same rocks and foundered.
Someone should put a warning buoy there!
Captain Kirk thought, briefly....
***there was a sandwich where a comparatively modern vessel was on top, an ancient vessel beneath, and under that, a more ancient vessel.****
Hmmm. Sounds like an old movie I saw years ago.
THE DEEP.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075925/
How could the wreck be shallow enough for sponge divers to reach (no dive gear), and yet be too deep for SCUBA divers? That makes no sense to me. Maybe they were phenomenal divers, who knows?
When I was younger I could free descend to about 75 feet and could hold my breath for 3 minutes, but that was after spending an entire summer, 8 hours a day, swimming.
Is that the one where a pretty girl with a nice figure wears a wet shirt a lot.
If so it was a good movie.
When I first read about the Antikithera mechanism as a kid, the story was that it was found by “sponge divers”. I pictured a couple kids my age in a rowboat or something, goofing off on a summer day, in ten feet of water.
In those days sponge diving was an industrial affair, with brutal working conditions and a very high mortality rate, because “the bends” wasn’t properly understood, and primitive dive gear.
If you ever see the movie “Beyond the 12 Mile Reef”, you will get a good understanding of sponge divers around Tarpon Springs, Florida I think.
They wore the old round head hard diving equipment and yes it was dangerous work. I think these were Greek divers.
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