Causes
According to the article, this is the single most common cause of shipwrecks — far more common than piracy or battle
What is aground/grounding?
This type of sonar, towed behind a ship as a "towfish," bounces sound off the seafloor to create an image, but can only locate wrecks that stick up above it
What is side-scan sonar?
According to WHOI, there are over 2,000 man-made habitats like this, made from repurposed ships, subway cars, and retired Navy vessels
Reef/artificial reefs
This 1997 blockbuster starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet brought the most famous shipwreck in history back to the big screen
Titanic
This 1912 shipwreck was called "unsinkable"
Titanic
After a ship ran aground, this natural event— described in the article as "a curse"—made things worse by lowering the water level and leaving more of the ship's weight resting on the rocks or coral below
What is a falling tide (low tide)?
This instrument, also towed behind a research vessel, detects changes in Earth's magnetic field caused by iron objects like anchors and cannons, even when they're buried in sediment
What is a magnetometer?
More than 2,500 of these decommissioned New York City vehicles were cleaned and sunk off the East Coast between 2001 and 2010 to create reefs
What are subway cars?
In Pirates of the Caribbean, Jack Sparrow captains this famous ship, which sinks in Dead Men Tell No Tales
The Black Pearl
Why are areas near wrecks called "underwater skyscrapers?"
Shipwrecks are tiny islands of structured habitat and can support tremendous amounts of marine life. Taller the structure, the higher the amount of fish
even on a "soft" bottom of mud or sand, a grounded ship could still be lost, held in place by this effect as it settled deeper
What is suction?
Unlike side-scan sonar, this type of sonar also measures depth, or bathymetry, giving a 3D picture of the seafloor instead of just a flat image
What is multibeam sonar?
This metal, common in ship hulls, is a limiting nutrient for photosynthetic microbes, so iron-hulled wrecks often attract rich biofilms and fish
What is iron?
The earliest known written account of a shipwreck comes from this ancient civilization
Ancient egypt
Unlike side-scan sonar, this type of sonar also measures depth, or bathymetry, giving a 3D picture of the seafloor instead of just a flat image
What is multibeam sonar?
The article lists lightning, boiler explosions, waterspouts, and collisions as causes that, combined, sank more ships than the stereotypical culprit did
Pirates
This newer sonar technology gathers images up to 30 times sharper than side-scan sonar, making it easier to confirm whether a sonar target is really a shipwreck
What is synthetic aperture sonar?
The debate over whether artificial reefs create new fish or just attract existing ones from nearby habitats is called attraction versus this
What is production?
Daniel Defoe’s 1719 work, considered by many to be the first English novel, begins with a shipwreck that leaves its main character as the only survivor
What is Robinson Crusoe
How long can shipwrecks linger?
more than a century
The article argues that wartime actually meant fewer shipwrecks, not more, because of a chain reaction: war raised this cost for ship owners, which reduced shipping traffic, leaving fewer ships around to wreck
What is insurance (insurance rates)?
In 2001, the NOAA Ship Whiting used its Klein 5500 side-scan sonar system to find this long-lost U.S. Navy submarine near Boston within just 8 hours of searching, nearly 80 years after it sank
What is the USS S-Five?
Effects from pollutants on a sunken ship have been detected in nearby microbes up to this many years later
What is 80 years?
Which term is used for the way events like the Titanic survive across generations through media, monuments, myths, and other shared representations?
Cultural memory
Why can shipwrecks remain dangerous even decades after they've sunk?
tanks holding supplies and fuel degrade and leak