Maritime Archaeology (SHIPWRECKS) Encore with Chanelle Zaphiropoulos

Shipwrecks. Treasure. Sunken planes. Scuttled submarines. New life forming around old machinery. There’s an -ology for that -- just ask Maritime Archaeologist and wreck nerd Chanelle Zaphiropoulos. This absolutely charming and passionate scuba diver, history buff and antiquities scholar dishes about pirates, warships, admirals worth admiring, and ships ranging in size from water taxis to the Costa Concordia and Titanic. Also world record diving stats, war graves, how owning a fountain pen can be egregious and why a Midwestern coal barge from the 1970s is worthy of weeping over. Ahoy!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

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• 1:13Alie Ward?

  Aura Ring tracks more than 50 metrics from your finger, and the Aura app brings that information together to help you see patterns across your sleep and stress, activity, and more, so you can start connecting the dots and figure out what works for you. Learn more at aura ring.com. Wear your best life with Aura. Oh, hey, it's 2025 Ally here to dig into my carpet bag of favorite episodes and handy one you may have missed. And if you didn't miss it, you can listen again because it's great. It's really, really a good one. Also, this encore is going up because last week I was in New York to tape a segment of The Tonight Show during which I showed Jimmy Fallon and Salma Hayek The Wonder of Bugs, and you can find that segment on YouTube.

• 1:56Alie Ward?

  But if you stick around to the end of the episode, I'll share a little bit more about that and some stuff that got cut. But first, shipwrecks. Let's go. Oh, hey, it's your wallet, which if I'm so important to you, why do you lose me all the time? Ally Ward back with a watery historical episode of Ologies. I've wanted to do this episode for so long. So this ologist is an ologite as well and pitched the topic to me with such zeal and such passion that I just couldn't wait to dive in and hear all about it. This Canadian got her bachelor's in Classical, Ancient, Mediterranean, and Near Eastern Studies and Archaeology from the Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada, where she was also the president of her scuba diving club.

• 2:41Alie Ward?

  And she's like moments away from her master's in Maritime Archaeology at the University of Malta. This was recorded a few years ago, so obviously she got it. We'll talk about what Malta is later. Now, as soon as I learned that her Twitter handle was Sharks and Rex, I was like, I gotta know this lady. I need her in my life. She's so enthusiastic about the science and the culture and her approach to what lost craft represent in terms of history and lives is really beautiful. I think you're gonna dig this archaeologist. Real quick, though, thank you to the patrons who sent in hundreds of questions for this. You can join for as little as a dollar a month. It's 25 cents an episode. Cheaper than a parking meter because my love is cheap.

• 3:25Alie Ward?

  And for no monies, you can support the show just by telling friends and tweeting. You can leave a review for me to discover, since I have read them all and I look for one to pick out each week. And this fresh 2025 one is from Amanda R. Farm D., who just graduated from their pharmacy program and wrote that Ologies has been with me from the start of my career. Over time, this show has shaped me into the scientist and pharmacist that I am today. Amanda R. Farm D., thank you for tucking me in your pocket along the way, like I sometimes do with my medication. And then hours later, I put my hand in my pocket and I'm like, shoot, I gotta take that. Okay, so maritime archaeology. Maritime archaeology comes from mare, which means sea in Latin, and archaeos, which is ancient in Greek.

• 4:10Alie Ward?

  And there are very niche differences between marine archaeology, nautical archaeology, and maritime archaeology. But this guest is technically a maritime archaeologist. And also, this gives me an excuse to do more episodes on stuff that's underwater. So, works for me. Now, she took a break from cleaning dive equipment and finishing up her master's thesis to hop on a call to chat about her love of the sea, mapping a sunken submarine, the Titanic, the Bermuda Triangle, pirates, booties, shipworms, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, transatlantic migrations, Atlantis, her favorite ship captain of all time, your new favorite

• 4:53Alie Ward?

  ship captain, thoughts on plundering wreck treasure, and the life that blooms around tragedy. So, batten down your hatches and shiver your timbers for a chat with maritime archaeologist, Chanel Zaphiropoulos.

• 5:26Alie Ward?

  Yes, a shipwreck expert.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  My name is Chanel Zaphiropoulos, or Zap, whatever is easier. And she/her.

• 5:36Alie Ward?

  And I'm gonna make you say it one more time slowly, just to make sure that I say it right.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Sure, I'll even hold the mic closer. Zaphiropoulos. And then the first name's just Chanel, like the perfume, but Zaphiropoulos.

• 5:49Alie Ward?

  Honestly, it's just like it's spelled. It's easy peasy. Ship's ahoi, let's go. Um, I've wanted to do maritime archaeology since before this podcast started.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 5:59Alie Ward?

  I know, there's not a lot of maritime archaeologists out there.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  There's not. Yeah, there's not a lot of us. And the cool thing about that is that we all study such like, different, unique things, which I love.

• 6:12Alie Ward?

  Are there different maritime archaeologists who study like, battleships and wooden boats and submarines? Or is it like, a sunken boat is a sunken boat?

• 6:23Speaker 01

  No, absolutely. So I had a professor who is the curator of the Maritime Archaeology Museum in Malta. His super niche specialty is food, like food on boats. Yes, like it's wonderful. I love it. But there's absolutely people who are specialists in wood boats, traditional boat building specialists from different regions. So you've got ethnographers, you've got tradespeople who are involved in it, all these sort of fun things, and absolutely naval historians, like nautical archaeology.

• 6:57Alie Ward?

  And do you have to leave the United States to do maritime archaeology, or is there a lot of it in the Great Lakes? Or why Malta?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  So I'm Canadian. So I wasn't super planning to go to the States to study it. Now, there are a few universities in the States that do do grad programs in maritime archaeology.

• 7:20Alie Ward?

  So in the US, Chanel says the University of Florida, East Carolina University, Texas A&M, they all have maritime archaeology programs. So looking at y'all, gators and pirates and dogs. Oh my.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  So there's definitely programs in the States. And the States has a great budget for maritime archaeology because there's this like military pride, and that's what a lot of funding for maritime archaeology comes from, that sort of naval interest. For me, Malta was the choice because my family roots are from the Mediterranean. So it was a chance for me to sort of go home. And I feel less like a foreigner in Malta than I would have in Texas, I feel like.

• 8:08Alie Ward?

  And you even have done some Maltese boat restoration too? When did that start?

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Yes. So I did not do the restoration myself. My class documented a boat that was being restored in the Maritime Museum. There were seven of us in our class, and we were the biggest we'd ever had. So, so our professor wanted us to document the restoration process that was going on on a pretty dilapidated traditional Maltese boat that was going to be put into the museum. So I mean, with only seven of us, we could all fit into that, you know, workshop, we could all ask our questions, we could all take our pictures. Just something you don't get in a massive program.

• 8:49Alie Ward?

  Couldn't you all fit in the boat also?

• 8:52Speaker 01

  We probably could. It's a pretty small boat.

• 8:54Alie Ward?

  So this is a small colorful Maltese boat and I looked it up and I was trying to figure out how to say this word and it's like attempting to pronounce the wind. I couldn't do it. It's spelled D G and H wearing some kind of hat, J S A. The phonetic key for it was just a bunch of upside down letters. I couldn't find a video of anyone saying it. Chanel later told me the name for this boat, Chansha? I don't know. She told me it's one of those words you just surrendered to copying and pasting. Malta, I love this word. I love you. I'm sorry I failed the pronunciation. Now, another similar boat is called a farila and it looks kind of like a gondola wearing a colorful flirty paint job.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  But basically, this boat was a water taxi.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  So when British boats were like naval vessels were stationed in the harbor, like you've got these great big huge boats that people are on out in the open sea. They can't really get super up close to land, so you load people into these smaller boats and they take you to shore or in modern day, like taking you across from one campus to another, as I did in Malta, which was a lot of fun.

• 10:08Alie Ward?

  And were you always a seafarer of some sort?

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Oh gosh, um, yes and no. Um, so I mean, my dad is Greek, my mom is Italian. They both immigrated to Canada. I think as a kid, I had this idea that they immigrated, like their families came over by boat and then that was just something that was never discussed. I think my mom actually came over by plane.

• 10:32Alie Ward?

  Chanel told me as a child, she'd read books about folks immigrating to the United States before her family who traveled by boat and she just assumed her family did the same. But she notes that not asking about your family's history is very different than being robbed of that knowledge by forced migration. And her grandfather was on the open ocean a lot, though, traversing the seas to Venezuela for work six months at a time. So Chanel feels like she has a seafaring constitution. Does she though? Do you get seasick? I'm gonna guess no.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  I've been seasick, uh, like twice and once I'm pretty sure it was food poisoning.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  But yeah, I did my undergrad in Newfoundland. So, and I actually started off in marine biology. So I was out on this like small little boat in the North Atlantic being tossed around by waves, trying to read instruments and whatnot. You get over seasickness very quickly doing that.

• 11:27Alie Ward?

  Yeah, I bet.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:30Alie Ward?

  So did you start off studying marine ecology?

• 11:34Speaker 01

  As a child, I had this like romantic idea. I wanted to do everything and I did not want to compromise. I was very into ballet and my theory was I was going to work as a scientist during the day and perform ballets at night.

• 11:50Alie Ward?

  A lot of five hour energy drinks.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Yep. And like, I didn't want to pick one type of biology. I wanted to be a cross-terrobiologist, which was something my brother came up with. And basically just like, I wanted to study bats. I wanted to study groundhogs. I wanted to study marine creatures, but definitely the marine environment had my heart hands down. So when I had to pick, there was no debate.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I just always loved the sea. Like I loved everything about the sea, but I did not know maritime archaeology was a thing when I was younger. And so I very much had this idea in my head that I wanted to study the ecosystems that grow on shipwrecks. I don't know how I got this idea as a kid, but I knew this was a thing. And I was like, that's what I want to do. And I just like slowly, slowly worked towards it. Eventually was in like my final year of university, found out about this program at Malta. I was like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to apply and see what happens.

• 12:44Alie Ward?

  It is such a specialized field, but you know, this makes me think because before if a vessel sinks, someone's like, where is it? You're like, oh, it's in the ocean. But when did we actually start getting to study these shipwrecks? And by we, I mean, people like you, definitely not me. But was it when we developed sonar radar? Like, how did it work?

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Great questions. Um, yeah. So I actually wrote a paper that was going through for a review. And it was a paper on maritime mortuary culture, so death at sea. I made this like comment about. How like, yeah, good luck finding a body at sea. Like, obviously not like that in a more academic sense.

• 13:27Alie Ward?

  That 2019 paper, by the by, was titled Buried in Brine Maritime Mortuary Practices During the Age of Sail. What even is her life? It's enthralling is what it is. Now, sonar, as we know it, came about after 1918. It was developed around World War I. But some early uses are said to be in the 1400s. When Leonardo da Vinci like screamed into an underwater tube, it said. And sometimes I'm like, did da Vinci really invent all this shit? Or did he just have like the best publicist ever? Good luck finding out. But back on topic, marine mortuary science is difficult.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Good luck finding where a particular body drifted in 300 kilometers of sea.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  So yeah, so in that sense, it's still very difficult to do that sort of work. Studying shipwrecks themselves, it's happened for a while. Like, we've been doing it in some way, shape or form for a while. Definitely the advent of scuba gear and sonar just escalated it like crazy. Cause we used to have diving bells. We used to have these like great big canisters. We could lower down into the water and with like piped air from the surface. And people would work and that's how they would work on like bridges. So we did have ways to explore underwater before self-contained underwater breathing apparatus was a thing.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  But just sort of, it was very limited. Definitely sonar makes it so much easier to locate things and communications, I would say is the other big thing. We know where the Titanic went down because we knew exactly how far into its voyage it was when it sank. We knew exactly what sort of latitude it was supposed to be traveling at. And we had communications via telegram if it had deviated versus before that. Okay, a ship didn't make it to harbor. You didn't find out about that until months later, when it was supposed to have come back and it still hasn't. Okay, so it was supposed to go from England to New Hampshire. What latitude did it end up with? Did bad weather force it to take a farther south trajectory? So it's like, pretty much good luck trying to

• 15:37Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Trying to figure that out.

• 15:39Alie Ward?

  Wait, okay. The Titanic could send texts? Yes. So in the late 1800s, electromagnetic radiation was used to communicate Morse code wirelessly from ships and lighthouses. And it could travel about 300 miles in the daytime, but double or triple after dark. So ships could send messages to each other. Rich people could send a telegram to shore, probably composing carefully like we do our vacation grams to seem both humble, but also luxurious. But the channels were flooded with chatter and warnings about ice didn't get picked up, which is the absolute worst possible version of did not see your text.

• 16:21Alie Ward?

  But another ship heard her calls and saved some of the 700 survivors, although 1,500 lives were lost to the sea off Newfoundland, 12,600 feet deep. And the world record for deepest dive of a human hits 330 meters or around 1,000 feet. How far into your studies were you when you got to dive around your first wreck?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. So I was like 11 when I started diving. My parents really hoped I would hate it. They're like, get a nice safe career, like a lawyer or something. But no, I loved it. I think I was like 13 when I did my first wreck swim through. So like I was snorkeling around or seeing lots of wrecks. I wasn't approaching them. And then when I was like 13, we went to this little wreck. Basically, all it was, was the cabin didn't have any doors on it. And you could just swim from one door to the, to the next. It was like two meters into the wreck. And I was just like, okay, check that off. And then eventually did wreck certifications and got more into it. I was in university when I got properly wreck certified.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  You don't need a wreck certification to dive near a wreck, but to actually go inside, it's a little bit more dangerous. So they require some more skills and practice and whatnot.

• 17:41Alie Ward?

  Can you tell me a little bit about what maritime archaeologists do? Are they collecting samples? Do they raise the ships off of the seafloor? Or is that very verbotum and it's like, keep it there?

• 17:56Speaker 01

  You're gonna hate me, but I'm gonna say it depends. Very classic scientist response. Institutions and governments have different practicing policies in different parts of the world. And then it also depends on your interests and your budget. Budget's a big thing. So there definitely have been wrecks that have been entirely surfaced. The Mary Rose, the Vasa is a big one.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  The La Belle that was found in the Gulf of Mexico, near Texas. It was by a Texas archaeologist who actually surfaced it.

• 18:30Alie Ward?

  Just a quick aside, some Cliff Notes. The Mary Rose was a 16th century English Tudor warship that capsized off the Isle of Wight and was raised up in the 1970s. And the Vasa is a Swedish warship that sank in the Stockholm harbor on its maiden voyage in 1628. Thousands of people had gathered to see her off and rounded a corner, hit some wind, flooded, sank. Now, the La Salle sank in a bay off the Gulf Coast in the late 1600s and was excavated in the 1990s. Hundreds of lives were lost in these wrecks. Millions of artifacts were salvaged. But there are a lot of conservation issues,

• 19:14Alie Ward?

  even if you manage to raise the funds to raise the ship.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  They spend like millions of dollars on the process of surfacing them, plus the conservation, and the conservation's for a lifetime. It will never stop. You're gonna continuously put money into it, not to mention like energy and everything else. So it's like, how big of a benefactor do you have if you wanna surface something? And then it also like, for me, there's the ethics of it. Some shipwrecks don't have a lot of marine life growth on it. They're not having a big ecological impact. So I'm like, okay, maybe you can surface it. Some have a negative impact, and so you're like, yes, do surface it. And then some is like, no, it's doing more good where it is. Like, it serves a purpose where it is.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Everything in archaeology has an equilibrium in terms of decay. So it's gonna reach a certain point where it's no longer gonna decay underwater. And underwater, actually, depending on the... The environment might be better for it than anything we can do on land. So if it's not in harm by shipping lanes, it's not in a site where there's going to be like development, maybe you're going to put offshore wind farm there. You might want to just leave it because it's going to cost a lot and it's, you know, it's doing some good where it is. So yeah, it's definitely a mixed bag.

• 20:34Alie Ward?

  Yeah. And, you know, sunken treasure. Did one person find sunken treasure one time and then everyone's like, a bunch of ships out there with gold on it? Or was that an actual thing where their banks were like in the hull?

• 20:51Speaker 01

  I wish I knew. I wish I knew more about pirates and whatnot. Um, I know a lot more about corsairs than I do about pirates.

• 20:59Alie Ward?

  What's a corsair?

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Okay. So corsairs are often called, air quotes, legal pirates, and that's not entirely true.

• 21:07Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Privateers, sorry, and then corsairs. Pirates do it for themselves, right? Like they're the thieves of the high sea. They are looking after their own interests. Corsairs are acting in the name of a country or a religion. Yeah, they do pillage other vessels and they do attack other boats and they do collect literal treasure. In the case of the Maltese corsairs, it was going to the Vatican. So it was like, you know, funding Catholicism.

• 21:33Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, but they, they also did do actual trade. So it might be like jewels and coins that they plundered from other vessels they came across. They might've been like, yeah, this load of pottery is going to fetch a pretty penny. We'll take that, please. So it wasn't like all treasure, but definitely they did have literal treasure chests and they had three keys to these treasure chests. The captain, I think it was the priest, and then the doctor all had one key. So you couldn't open it unless you had all three keys to make sure that the captain didn't steal from it because that was partially going to be your wages as your crew.

• 22:07Alie Ward?

  There are legit pirateologists out there and one day I will talk to one and it will be on the show and I'm excited. Also, did you know that Florida has a whole coast called the Treasure Coast? Because 11 Spanish Italians sank in a 1715 hurricane. There's millions of dollars worth of incredibly shiny gold and silver coins out there. And sometimes they just wash ashore like Vegas jackpot style. Only it's Florida and it's pirate treasure. How often is marine archaeology employed in looking for something that was sunk on a vessel? Like a big necklace or something?

• 22:50Speaker 02

  But I thought the old lady dropped it into the ocean in there.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  Well, baby, I went down and got it for you.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Aw, you shouldn't have.

• 22:58Alie Ward?

  For example?

• 23:00Speaker 01

  In terms of something like that, I don't know if it ever really would. Cause I don't like, how much does this necklace have to be worth to warrant the amount of money that you're going to spend looking for it and then excavating it? Because it's not going to just land on the seabed and then 400 years later be right on the seabed, like you're going to actually have to excavate it more than likely and then go through the whole conservation process. But for bigger items, like the Parthenon marbles that Lord Elgin stole, I think it was like three of the shipwrecks didn't even make it to England. They sank. So when possible vessels that were containing them were found, it was like, everybody was like, yeah, let's put the money in, let's excavate them, let's study them, let's see.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Cause those really did not belong there and laws and ethics abound.

• 23:50Alie Ward?

  I'm sure.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. So people were willing to throw money at that.

• 23:55Alie Ward?

  So when she said Elgin marbles, I pictured an actual bag of marbles, like in the end of the Goonies. But first off, by marble, they mean marble statues of naked Greek deities. And by Elgin, that was the seventh Earl of Elgin, who some say stole and just straight up looted these statues from Greece. And then they sank in 1802 on his ship, the Mentor. Then they were fished out later and now they're in a museum in London. So folks tend to call them the Parthenon marbles because fuck this Elgin guy and the ship he sank in on. Well, he wasn't on it when it sank in the Mediterranean, where there do seem to be a lot of quality shipwrecks. Okay. So Malta, it's little, it's like a little thing hanging off of the boot.

• 24:39Alie Ward?

  What is it about Malta that it's just, just a chock a block with shipwrecks? Or are there that many shipwrecks all over the world?

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Um, okay, so there are many, many shipwrecks. I don't know if we could put an actual number on it, but like millions of shipwrecks all over the world.

• 24:58Alie Ward?

  Oh my god!

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty much anywhere where there's water, you're going to find like maritime culture. So whether that's the form of shipwrecks or settlements that have fallen into the sea. What I say is like, I don't say I work with shipwrecks. I say I work with submerged material culture. So that's like human things that have ended up underwater.

• 25:17Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  So it's a little bit more inclusive. But so anywhere where there's water, you're gonna find that because that's something that humans have always needed to survive. Be it freshwater or like saltwater, because on islands like Malta, for example, and even like Newfoundland and Greece, you rely on salt for preservation. So it's like this maritime culture is like huge. It's super heavily prevalent. It's always a matter of what preserves. So I mean, you might not see the shipwrecks, but that doesn't mean that they didn't happen. And that doesn't mean that you might not find evidence of them because there's just so many factors that go into what gets preserved as a shipwreck.

• 25:52Alie Ward?

  Most shipwrecks, do they happen because of weather, running around, icebergs? What is sinking most of these vessels?

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Depends. So in some parts of the world, icebergs are definitely more of a concern than they are in other parts of the world. Newfoundland, where I did my undergrad, definitely has a lot more concern with icebergs. There's this whole area called Iceberg Alley where tourists go every year to watch icebergs actually break off. Beautiful, very sad, but beautiful. But yeah, so I mean, definitely it's a concern there. In Newfoundland, you also have crazy fog. So that's definitely another weather condition. There have been reports of vessels that just got lost in fog for days and couldn't navigate. And when you have this heavy fog, you don't have wind. So if you're relying on wind power, you can't really get anywhere.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  If you're relying on oil, if you happen to be going in the wrong direction, you're just going farther away from land.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  A lot of wrecks happen in zones of convergence. The channels, things narrow out and you have to go through a potentially more dangerous area.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  A lot of wrecks happen because of other wrecks. It's a fun thing to say too.

• 27:06Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Like one ship goes down, yeah. Like if you, if you think back to when ships had masts, like one ship goes down because you navigated wrong or weather or whatever, you now don't have five meters beneath you till the rocks. You have a few meters before the masts, the superstructure, all of that stuff. Some more modern wrecks have alcohol being a case.

• 27:29Alie Ward?

  Oh, yes, the Costa Concordia?

• 27:34Alie Ward?

  The Costa Concordia, side note, was a cruise ship that sank in shallow waters off Tuscany in 2012. It resulted in 32 deaths and 16 years in prison for the captain, who left the ship high and dry with 300 passengers still on it and perhaps a lot of mafia cocaine on board. Rumors, they're just rumors. But while on trial for abandoning his post, he explained that he hadn't abandoned. He'd merely slipped off the ship when it turned over and it happened to fall into a lifeboat, which is like a plot point in an Adam Sandler movie. It's the worst excuse for anything I've ever heard, which is probably why he was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

• 28:19Alie Ward?

  I mean, that, do you think that that was one of the, the bigger, modern shipwrecks of our time? And is it still just hanging out there?

• 28:29Speaker 01

  No, so they did actually move it. So that's the thing, a lot of modern shipwrecks, especially if they're easily accessible, we will try to move if they're not historic. Because if you can imagine, these all have a lot of oil on board, especially if it happened at the beginning of a voyage. We don't want that seeping out. So, I mean, that vessel, it was only like, it wasn't even submerged. They just like ran aground. They moved it to like a harbor. They moved it somewhere where they could actually like extricate it. And a lot of times you can do like patchwork repairs, get something floating enough to be able to just tow it ashore. And yeah, decide what to do with it next. A lot of times those turn into artificial reefs. Like you clear it out, you get rid of the oil, get rid of any like seat cushions,

• 29:14Speaker 01

  plop it back down somewhere else where you need it.

• 29:16Alie Ward?

  Does it work to help break the waves as well?

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Depending on where you put them, yeah, exactly. It's multi, multi-purpose. So a lot of times like there's, I know of a couple wrecks off like purposefully scuttled US Coast Guard cutters from World War, I think like two, well, it must have been two, that were placed along the US coast so that German U-boats wouldn't go closer because they thought it was treacherous or whatever. So absolutely wave breaks are fantastic reason to put them down and a very, very important one because that protects coastal communities that are prone to erosion.

• 29:49Alie Ward?

  Ah, so might as well just toss a boat in there.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, if they're not using it anyways. And then it funds the ecosystem, you know, you get fishermen going out on it, you get tourist dive groups going out to visit it. A lot of times people will see proposals to scuttle these like old ferries or whatever. And they're like, ah, it's a waste of taxpayer money. But it's like, look at the potential benefit that I can have. It might actually gain you more money.

• 30:14Alie Ward?

  And now your work in particular, you are studying the Olympus, this submarine. This is the site of a shipwreck and there's, it's also technically a war grave?

• 30:25Speaker 01

  It is, yes. And this confuses people because all like, whenever I'm talking about it, I'll say how there was, you know, 112, I think, people on board. 98 potentially made it off. And you're like, okay, well, how is it a war grave to 90 something people or like, you know, 100 people? Like, well, if you don't know where somebody actually died, because some of the crew did make it back to shore. But for a whole bunch of them that didn't, like the 90 odd people who didn't, we don't have any one place to actually tie to as their final resting place. So we use that closest proxy, the place that had their belongings, the place that they should have been. This is what we relate to as their final resting place. So it's a war grave.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  It definitely is a war grave for the eight or so people who didn't make it out. But for everybody else who didn't make it to shore, that's what we will still. Consider as a point of respect for them.

• 31:17Alie Ward?

  What type of work in diving and investigation do you get to do with it? Or do you, has anyone entered it? Or is it completely sealed? How does it work?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Great questions. Um, I don't get to do any diving on it. Unfortunately, it's 115 to 120 meters deep. So you can do an aside with the conversions of that. I'm not, I'm very metric.

• 31:45Alie Ward?

  The HMS Olympus, just some stats on that. World War II sub. It's 86 meters long, six meters wide, and it hit a mine and sunk, killing 89. But it yielded nine survivors who swam seven miles to the shore. And its location was discovered in 2011, about 115 meters below the surface, or about 350 feet deep. Which is deep?

• 32:12Speaker 01

  So for reference, I've been diving for like 15 years and I'm only really qualified to dive to 50 meters. So not even half of that. The people that do dive down to it, it's like an eight hour trip. Like they have to come up so slowly for their own safety. And you only get like six to 12 minutes on the bottom, depending on how long your ascent is going to be. So there is not much excavation that happens on that site, partially because of this limitation, but also because it is a war grave and there are laws that are in place around it, especially because it's a British war grave. Because again, every country has its own laws. So for us, it's a very much a look, don't touch approach.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  So I work entirely from videos brought up by other divers. Because there are divers who can reach it, just not me. And so this is where it sort of becomes a community approach because I can't do it myself. We can go down with ROVs, so remotely operated vehicles, and collect some data that way. It's, to my experience, not as good quality as what gets collected by hand.

• 33:22Alie Ward?

  Why is that? Well, an ROV can be a little herky-jerky depending on who is operating it. So imagine your dog grabbing a toy versus like a ghoulish Boston Dynamics canine cyborg. It's just a little uncanny.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  I don't know, sitting and watching that video, you hear the machinery moving. There's this bigger presence in the video and perhaps this is all in my head. But I mean, the fish react to it, like fish do not like this huge thing with lights everywhere,

• 33:53Speaker 01

  making all this noise. So they act very differently around the ROV than they would around divers. If you can, maybe try to get images of this and try to look, you know, at the attachment structures. Like I get to sort of theoretically direct where people can look. And then that will impact the quality of the footage we get too, because that means I can do specific analysis, which would be so much cooler.

• 34:17Alie Ward?

  What exactly are you looking for? Like you've sent a diver down. They've got eight to 12 minutes with a sunken submarine. I feel like it's like one of those grocery shopping games where it's like grab as much as you can. Again, get out of here. Everyone's favorite guilty as pleasure. What are they looking for?

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so pretty much. So I mean, a lot of divers that go down, they just want to swim the length of it. They're there for the experience, right? They're not there working for me. I get this all secondhand. I have to be very delicate with any requests I make. So a lot of them, they're like, this is like an Everest. They just want to experience as much of it as they can. So in terms of archaeologists, because they have tried to study it. One of my former professors actually tried to do, wanted to do 3D models of it. Because that is how we study underwater wrecks by proxy. Like we can't go back and visit a site just whenever we feel like it. Because it's, you know, hours away from the port, it's underwater, it's so expensive. You need a whole crew, like you can't just go out for a walk and visit the shipwreck.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  You need like a crew of 10 people. So what he wanted to do was create a 3D model. And because of the organisms that are on that specific shipwreck, the 3D model does not work. So what I do, because I have a background in marine biology is like, I ideally would get to say, okay, this species has formed here and this is what this species looks like. So I'm creating what's called an ec map of the wreck itself. And we have a baseline so we can see with continued diving on it. Does it cause damage? Are they benefiting from the increased oxygen? Are they moving? Like, how is this wreck? Because it's a dynamic site. How is this changing over time?

• 35:58Alie Ward?

  I was curious to look up exactly what grows on the HMS Olympus. And a Google return found me a paper titled, "The Deep Water Ecology of the HMS Olympus: An Analysis of the Archaeological Impact of Marine Growth on Submerged Material Culture Beneath the Photic Zone." And I was like, snap, does Zap know about this? And turns out, its co-author is indeed Chanel Zaphiropoulos. So, looking at photos of the sunken submarine, it's kind of bedazzled with fan corals and growths and surrounded by flickering pink fish that dart around it. And Chanel deals with the difficulty of making 3D models of something so encrusted, and also looks at the ecosystems that thrive outside it. But what about inside?

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Entering a submarine is like nigh on impossible in terms of safety. This one has two entrance exit points. So you never would, because it's a war grave for one. But on top of that, this one is somewhat safe because there's the blast point where you can enter and then the hatch is actually open. If only one was available, you wouldn't. It's too risky. But even so, because it did undergo an explosion, like, we have no precedent. Like, I can't say it's safe. I have no clue how the structural integrity of that site is, after all this time underwater, plus having gone through an explosion.

• 37:17Alie Ward?

  In terms of maritime mortuary science, too, is that across the board? If there is someone who passed away on the vessel or if it's considered a grave? It's hands off?

• 37:32Speaker 01

  So in terms of war graves, it's hands off, but they basically decided that war graves of all sorts have the sovereignty of the nation that they belong to. And that's like a sort of all of the signatories have decided like, we're going to give them this respect. So you can't defame the grave or anything else. That does not apply to sort of merchant vessels, or if a fishing vessel goes down, like, there is no protections in place, which sucks, which really, really sucks. I am of the opinion that every sort of site of death should be respected. Not to say like, it's not like I don't want people to visit them. I just don't necessarily agree that you should be going down and taking things or like making

• 38:15Speaker 01

  funny face pictures with, like, I don't know, ship propellers. I don't know.

• 38:19Alie Ward?

  Okay, side note, I went on Instagram and got sucked into the watery abyss that is the wreck diving hashtag. And there are some beautiful photos of all kinds of humanities, tragedies and foibles and scuttled ships. But there are also a lot of people just taking windows and bottles and portholes to keep as decor in their backyard. On wrecks where scores of people died. And it, I don't know, it seems weird. Chanel says that she's met many divers who kind of shrug and say, you know, if archaeology is for everyone, then why can't I take it? It should belong to me as much as anyone else. And she says that beyond drawing the distinction between humans belonging to heritage and

• 39:04Alie Ward?

  not humans owning heritage, the best response, she says, she's been able to find is that by removing artifacts, they stop it from being accessible to as many people as possible. And one thing that's eagerly sought from wrecks is a ship's bell, which is engraved with her name. And the Titanic's bell was recovered from the seabed in the 1980s. And I don't know, for some reason, it just gives me shivers to think about it above the surface again, kind of like seeing a ghost or an eerie But those bells can mean a lot to survivors or relatives of survivors of the wreck and are rung at certain times in memorial. That being said, how do maritime archaeologists feel about like the Titanic effect?

• 39:49Alie Ward?

  And, you know, James Cameron and shipwrecks as entertainment or lore? Like, what's the general feel toward that?

• 39:59Speaker 01

  There's good and there's bad to it, right? Like, if you show that there's a public interest in something, it's easier to get funding to study it or preserve it. But there's also the people who will see that and be very interested in it and see that nothing's happening to it that they can see. Like, you know, an archaeological site on land might have a fence up around it. Nobody's putting a fence around a shipwreck. Like, we can't do that. We can't put guards at them. We can't put park rangers. So a lot of people will see a shipwreck and be like, oh, yeah, cool. This is here. It's just going to be damaged by time. I'm just going to take it with me, which is not always a good thing to do. Because a lot of times we see unexploded ordnance going home with people. Unexploded ordnance? Grenades or even just bullets.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  And those are like, the gunpowder is inert when it's wet. But as it dries, like even a bullet could have... I've seen things get put on mantles. I'm just like, oh, I'm very, very, very worried about the heat from this fireplace. Even just a bullet exploding could cause a heart attack, I can imagine. I just cringe.

• 41:05Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God. That is, that is nuts. Someone's like, I found this cool shell. And you're like, that's a grenade.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, because like, it's all concreted. It's got like organisms growing off of it. You have no clue. Like, most of us don't even recognize what a gunshot sounds like because they're altered, because they sound so fake that they're altered when we hear them on like... Movies and things, same thing goes. Like, we don't understand what a grenade looks like, especially not when it's been through this, like this process.

• 41:34Alie Ward?

  I have so many questions from listeners. There's so many, and they're such good questions. Can I lob some Patreon questions at you in a lightning round?

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely.

• 41:44Alie Ward?

  Ooh, okay. But before we do, a quick word about sponsors of the show. They let us donate to a good cause each week, and Chanel chose Diving with a Purpose, DWP. And DWP educates and empowers traditionally disenfranchised people as community scientists. And they started with members of the National Association of Black Scuba Divers, and they train young divers between the ages of 16 and 23 from diverse backgrounds as underwater archaeology advocates. So to find out more, you can go to divingwithapurpose.org. A donation to them was made possible by some sponsors of ologies. This episode is sponsored by Seed. Bloating, irregular bowel movement, gas.

• 42:26Alie Ward?

  When your gut is off, it gets your attention. Seed's DS1 is a three-time award-winning probiotic clinically shown to improve regularity, reduce bloating, and alleviate gas, so you can move and eat more freely. Take better care of your gut with Seed. Get 25% off with code 25OLOGIES at seed.com/ologies. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. We have to say that. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free

• 43:10Alie Ward?

  online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S.com/ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years. It's an all in one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have, or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily.

• 43:52Alie Ward?

  I've been using Squarespace since before Ologies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates, they have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients, you can get paid. They have built in tools for scheduling and invoicing and email all in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up, or someone who's just starting a business, I'm like, dude, Squarespace. So head to Squarespace.com/ologies for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code OLOGIES to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You can do it. Being safer on the road starts with the person behind the wheel.

• 44:36Alie Ward?

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• 45:21Alie Ward?

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• 46:04Alie Ward?

  now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, just let them know it was Ologies. It's the best way to support the show. Okay, back to underwater nautical inquisition. We can skip any that you want to, but a lot of folks, Claire Meyer asked this, David Obi, first time question asker, Katie V., Ruby Johnstone, Mo Casey, Bugs Arad also asked, they all wanted to know, in David Obi's words, what's the number one wreck you wish you could freely explore, but you can't? Ruby asked, is there an El Dorado of shipwrecks? Like a mythical ship that has yet to be discovered? Is there one out there that people are like, where is it?

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. I feel like every ship is that until it becomes discovered. And like, the thing is, even when we discover a shipwreck, a lot of times we don't know exactly what ship it is until like years of study, right?

• 47:02Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Which is super cool. Oh, yeah.

• 47:04Alie Ward?

  The HMS Olympus, for example.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  We can tell from the sonar images that it's a submarine, but there's a few different submarines that went down potentially in that area. Because again, we don't have like, it's not like when a flight goes missing, you've got the black box like radar for the last place. We don't have that for like older ships. So you do all this detective work before you can dive down to it. Because most of us don't have the budget to just be like, yeah, see you later.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Acre's away, ladies.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  It's just like, okay, so it's this long, it's this wide, so that fits these different classes of vessels. And, oh, we can see this feature, so that gets rid of all these different categories. Like, so there's all this narrowing down. And then, like with the Olympus, they actually dove down and they could see it had its symbol on the actual hull. And you're like, yeah, okay, this is the Olympus. It matched with the survivor records. They could see that the damage to the hull was at the spot that the survivors said it was. You don't get that most of the time if you don't have survivors. Even when you find a shipwreck, we don't know what it is. And like, the La Belle is a classic case of one where this archaeologist spent most of his career looking for it. And I think like the year before he retired was when he finally found it.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  So like one of my personal heroes is this Greek naval captain. Uh, she actually went on to be like the first female lieutenant in the Russian Navy. Her name is Laskarina Bubalina. And she fought during the Greek War of Independence. And like, part of me is like, I would love to find any wreck that's associated with her. Probably not gonna happen. And that's okay. But basically, because like wooden shipwrecks, when they're damaged in conflict. So there's a few ways that can happen. You either would try to damage their mast or make or their um rudder so that they can't navigate. And then you try to board a vessel. And this goes for corsairs as well.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  You try to board a vessel and then you claim it because boats and the cannons on them are so expensive to make and so labor intensive. A good ship you can use for years on end, right? Um, so you don't actually want to like just destroy it to smithereens, which you see in a lot of movies.

• 49:11Alie Ward?

  Uh huh.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Um, like Pirates of the Caribbean, no.

• 49:14Alie Ward?

  Yeah, sure.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Master and Command is a pretty good, like, it's not underwater archaeology, but it's like maritime history. So that's a pretty good movie. Sorry, just came to mind.

• 49:24Alie Ward?

  No, I want to watch that now.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:26Alie Ward?

  Since recording this, I did watch it and I'll be honest, I was in a mood and I was like, I hate watching all these smelly guys yelling at each other. I'm over it. But also getting back to Admiral Laskarina Bubalina for one second. So this lady was born in prison. Her father was a revolutionary. She grew up, she had a seafaring husband who was killed by pirates. She took over his shipping business and had more boats built, including a giant warship called Armageddon, which is not a subtle name. And she died in a gun battle with her in-laws. Paintings of her look like the teacher in high school you're terrified of, who also taught you the most and you liked the most.

• 50:10Alie Ward?

  So what happened to her eight ginormous ships?

• 50:14Speaker 01

  If they actually did get blown to smithereens or like damaged beyond repair, wood floats a lot more than metal wood.

• 50:20Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  So it would just sort of disperse before actually sinking, which is not something that you see in a like weather catastrophe or something that runs aground. Something that runs aground and takes on water will sink more or less intact, have a very small debris field. Wood that's going to float, that's in small pieces, is going to spread a lot more and not sink as much. So it's going to be more scavenged by marine life and worms and everything else.

• 50:46Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm. It's funny because you think about all the wooden ships that have sailed for centuries. You're like, yeah, where did they all end up? It's not like there's a big ship junkyard with all of them. You know what I mean? They must all be out in the seas somewhere.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I mean, like, so, yeah, that's the thing. A lot of people are like, wow, there's so many. Like, I'll tell them there's like an infinite number of shipwrecks, like so many I can't put a number to it. How? Don't we? Haven't we sailed forever? I'm like, yeah, but a good ship is gonna last decades. And anything that's old enough eventually is gonna fail, like, you know? Or it gets repurposed. And wood just doesn't survive. Wood decomposes like crazy.

• 51:25Alie Ward?

  So. Oh, that makes so much sense. You know, Alya Myers had a great question. They asked, what about planes? There's got to be planes in the ocean or cars or submarines, helicopters. Other vehicles must be down there. Is anyone looking for them?

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I, like, that's one of the things I like to use the term wreck because that's sort of a more encompassing term because anything is wreckage. You know, whether we're a train wreck or, yes, certain parts of the world, there are lots of cars underwater. I've done side scan sonar surveys along coastal like roads. And wherever there's a sharp bend in the, in the road, I can see a couple of cars on the sonar. Some of them we know because we get stories of people who like, don't want to pay to take it to junkyard. Like, it's a piece of scrap and they just sort of run it off the road. Sometimes you know that there's accidents. Sometimes there's been cases where they had to be investigated by police. So, yeah. And then there's also, this happens a couple of

• 52:22Speaker 01

  times of summer in Greece, and I'm sure all over the world, cars that fall off of ferries, like just that miss the ramp.

• 52:29Alie Ward?

  Oh, no.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Happen. Yeah. So they're right in ports.

• 52:34Alie Ward?

  Yep. Now, if you see a car underwater, do you mention it to anyone or?

• 52:41Speaker 01

  It depends on the area. We will try to get as much detail as possible. There's areas where we know that it's a known sort of refuse spot. So we might mention it to, you know, environmentalists and be like, yeah, okay, something needs to be done.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  If it's new or if it's a blip, or especially if we know that there's somebody that did go missing in an area, we will absolutely mention it. And typically, we don't like finding bodies. We don't like working with bodies. So absolutely, any case where we might find one, it's not entirely our job to do that retrieval, and we will definitely make sure that people get it. But yeah, airplane wrecks, very cool. So the overlap between like aerial archaeology and maritime archaeology is super big because a lot of the warplanes that have gone down, like World War II especially planes, a lot of their records of how they were built got destroyed following the wars,

• 53:39Speaker 01

  like burnt or just like, oh, we don't need these anymore, scrap them. So for a lot of different types of airplane wrecks, or airplanes, I should say, like historically significant, like biplanes and things, we have no clue how they were built. So when they get preserved underwater, that's like our only chance to study how they were constructed.

• 53:58Alie Ward?

  Oh, that's cool. So it's kind of like taking apart a sunken Ikea bookshelf and trying to figure out how you piece it together?

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 54:06Alie Ward?

  It's one way to do it. Just a few for those taking notes. The 1941 Blenheim and the 1943 Bristol Bowfighter, both sunk off the Malta coast. And the crew of the latter were rescued by those water taxis that look like a bad Scrabble hand I can't pronounce, that are like DG, like a Farila, essentially. There's also the Micronesian Chuk Lagoon, which is a former Japanese naval base that Jack Custo explored, calling it "The Lagoon of Lost Ships." And for some vintage documentary vibes, look for his 1969 film.

• 54:43Speaker 04

  Further exploration suddenly yields an unexpected find in the northwest anchorage of the lagoon.

• 54:48Alie Ward?

  Now, speaking of yore, a ton of people asked about age of shipwrecks, like first time question asker Sammy Baker, Marty Goodwin, Cheyenne Spencer, Kayla Gunning, Gavin, Hillary Larson, Ned Lansing, Earl of Grammalkin, Chris Alfonso, literally all these people, Deanna Burgess, Laura Stacey, and first round question asker Lauren Cooper, who asked, what's the oldest shipwreck you've ever found? And how pants shittingly cool was it? But in general, how far back can we date them?

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, so it depends on the wreck, definitely. That annoying, typical scientist answer, depends. And we've got a lot of different materials at our disposal, like resources at our disposal to age them. And the one that everybody knows is carbon dating. We can carbon date shipwrecks, some of them. Depending on the age, we'll decide how accurate that carbon date is, but which is still super cool. Water typically doesn't affect our ability to carbon date unless only part of the wood has been decomposed, like the organic matter. Sometimes you have conditions that the inorganic component of wood stays intact and you're like, oh, this is awesome. I've got great wood. And it turns out all the organic matter is gone. So you can't actually carbon date it very well.

• 56:02Alie Ward?

  Ooh. Quick aside, chemistry fun fact. So organic matter has carbon and C14 dating is only applicable to organic and some inorganic materials, but not applicable to metals. What? I didn't even realize that. But you can use it on things like wood and bones and leather and pottery and such.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Typically, we can carbon date, but that's only one source that we'll use because carbon dating has a pretty big error factor, like plus or minus so many years. And then plus you add on to that the fact that the carbon date is not the date that the ship sank. It's the date that the tree was cut down.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  So depending on where in the world the timber is from, they have different methodologies for building ships and for harvesting timber. You might have trees going into building a ship from fifteen different seasons, like fifteen different years. And then on top of that, you might have wood that sort of sits in a shipyard or gets seasoned for X number of years before it actually gets built. And then the ship gets used for so many years before it actually sinks. So the date that you get might be a hundred years before the date that it actually sank anyways. So then there's all these other methods that we use. And so one of the big things would be looking at what's actually on the shipwreck, the whatever was in the hull, the materials it was carrying.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  So things like amphoras and bottles and coins all have like very stylistic changes that are very unique to different places and time periods. And that's one way that we can track the age of a shipwreck. And then you get what I'm doing. So sea creatures, especially hard-shelled sea creatures, grow at set rates, right? They've got sort of growth rings in their own shells. And so this is called sclerarchnology. And this isn't exactly what I'm doing, but it feeds into that. So if there's this idea that the coral reef or the ecosystem that's growing on the shipwreck can help indicate how long it's been there for, we can sort of backdate it.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  So my site, I know it's only been there for seventy-five years. I know that I have a rough estimate of the growth rate factors for all those organisms, you know, divided by seventy-five years.

• 58:22Alie Ward?

  So maybe the wreck is two hundred years old, but the coral is a spry fifty. So she can find a shipwreck at a similar depth and compare notes on the living critters to get a rough estimate, kind of like a wreck detective. A wreck-tective.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  So you'll typically look at all these different factors as many as you can and crunch them together to figure out. Like, you know, where as much overlap as possible within all your different dates is. And then that gives you a more narrow time period for the ship's actual sinking.

• 58:53Alie Ward?

  Oh, that's some detective work.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:55Alie Ward?

  Sclerocrinologists.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  Yes. You should absolutely get an episode on that.

• 59:00Alie Ward?

  I know. I was like, don't think that didn't lodge itself in my level brain. I was like, never heard of that one.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Because everybody knows about dendrochronology, which is super cool. But then this is like dendrochronology on living organisms, which is also super cool.

• 59:13Alie Ward?

  Amazing. Annual growth rings. Who knew? Who knew? Okay, a lot of people had a question about what is the most interesting find on a shipwreck? In your opinion? So Amanda Chris says, first time question asker, longtime listener. What is the most fascinating discovery or item on a shipwreck? And why is it the Antikythera mechanism?

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Yes, okay. Chef's kiss to you. I knew somebody was going to ask that.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  So in Greece, you have a lot of like bigger islands. And then you have like a smaller island opposite it. And because they're part of the same municipality, like you don't give the smaller island its own name. It's the island opposite that island. So that's where Antikythera gets its name from. Because it's opposite Kythera. So it's a smaller island just off the coast of Kythera, which is another island. So and that was where I mentioned the Parthenon marbles had sunk. So the Antikythera mechanism is like often called the world's first computer. It's basically like four clocks. I think there was one that they think was every four years instead of every 12 hours. And so they speculated that it tracked the Olympics.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  I don't know the validity of that. But it also has like evidence that it might be linked to astrological or astronomical dyslexic. So I get them confused. But so it was theoretically something that helped navigation. Because in order to track where you are at sea, you need to know the time and where you are. If you're looking at the night sky, if you're navigating via the sky, you need to know the time. Because that's going to decide where in the night sky certain things are. And then so depending on it, the angles that they're at compared to the horizon. And if you know the time, you know how far you've traveled from your origin.

• 1:01:06Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  So you get into like the quantum physics of like knowing spacetime and everything else. How they figure this.

• 1:01:13Alie Ward?

  A box with brassy cogs and wheels and astrological symbols, but corroded and fused into one rocky blob. So after its discovery by some sponge divers in 1901, it sat around for a few years because no one really knew or cared that this was possibly the first analog computer to predict eclipses and such. This was sunk in on a vessel?

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Yes, there's a whole bunch of rumors behind it. I don't know how much of it we actually know for sure, but I know some theorize that it was a, because it was a Roman vessel, we know this, and it was traveling through the Greek islands. Some people think that it was like on its way to Julius Caesar. I don't know the validity of that. Some people also speculate that it was designed by like the father of trigonometry, the guy that came up with the first trigonometric tables, which sort of tracks if he's figuring out all this navigational stuff.

• 1:02:10Alie Ward?

  I looked this up. It was a dude named Hipparchus from about 150 BCE. But yes, no one cared at first. And then they were like, oh, this is bananas. What is time? What is life? Would anyone like to buy a sponge?

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  But yeah, so that's a very, very cool mechanism. That's cool because it's the only one that we've found like it. And it's sort of standalone in space and time. The coolest things I think are always the things that show us about their daily lives. It's always going to be the things that you don't expect, but anything that tells you about the daily life. Because like as an archaeologist, we are interested in people's culture and like how they spend their time. So absolutely, like whatever the captain has, whatever fine china he might have in his cabin is neat. But when you find gambling dice on a ship, like a shipwreck from a period and a time that you know that gambling was prohibited, that's pretty neat, too.

• 1:03:03Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  Or like finding clay pipes. It's like, oh, my God, you find clay pipes everywhere. But it's like, we now also understand why tobacco is still such a big thing today because it was like omnipresent in the past.

• 1:03:15Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm. Oh, and you know, a lot of people had questions. In that realm, like first time question asker, Dillatant cosplay and Robo Chamblay and Emily Okerlund, Natalie Rhodes, Rachel Kasha, Zoe Jane. I love these questions. Sarah Crowder, they all wanted to know about eating things that have been jarred in a shipwreck, like shipwrecked wine. And can you snack on stuff after bringing it up from the ocean floor?

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  I don't know if you would want to with some of them. So like, the really cool thing is, and like, I would, I would love to be able to try some like Roman wines. Like you see about these like Roman wines that they pull out of places in Pompeii and they extract the formula from the inside of the vessel, like the amphoras and stuff. We can do a lot of that with shipwrecked materials. Because clay amphoras collect, like they absorb whatever's stored within them, we can do like thin section analysis of the inside of these amphoras and figure out where they're holding olive oil, and then potentially even where that olive oil was actually from. Was it this famous fish sauce that was like a major trade item in the Roman Empire?

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Or was it wine? The thing is, we can't actually try the actual wine, because one of the biggest mysteries we still have is how amphoras were actually corked, or like sealed. Because these big clay jars are very heavy and they sink to the bottom. And so shipwrecks that had clay jars rather than barrels, like that's the thing, we think clay jars are very, very old and barrels are much more modern, but there was overlap between the two in terms of production and use. But shipwrecks with barrels don't preserve as well, because they don't have the weight that pushes them into the sediment to protect them from organisms. And the barrels themselves then decompose. So it's like, we have no clue what these shipwrecks were carrying if we do find them, because the barrels are gone. But these amphoras, we can actually figure out if

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  they were carrying like wine or oil or whatever. I don't think we have enough evidence from that to be able to recreate it. Because they get uncorked, everything washes out. So literally, all we have, we don't even have remains. All we have is like whatever tiny little amount was absorbed by the clay.

• 1:05:34Alie Ward?

  Wow. That's so interesting. I wasn't sure if they would just stay sealed.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and that's the thing we don't know because like the theory is that they were somehow corked, like there was some sort of piece of wood put on top and they were sealed with wax.

• 1:05:47Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Um, and if that's the case, like the wood would theoretically decompose or maybe even get dislodged. Lots of them sort of crack, you get like the necks cracked off.

• 1:05:56Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Um, but yeah, it's like some people even theorize that it was just like waxed, like oil cloth, just tied around the neck.

• 1:06:04Alie Ward?

  Huh.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Not super secure in the turbulence of a sinking. That's like one of the biggest mysteries that we still have about the ancient world. It's like, how the heck did you seal these amphoras?

• 1:06:15Alie Ward?

  Oh, I never knew.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  That's a super mundane question.

• 1:06:17Alie Ward?

  Oh, I never knew. They were the mason jars of yore. They were everywhere. Hipsters used them in seafaring bars.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  So like, the funniest thing is that, cause like amphoras and the stamps, the the designs that they had were like unique to different regions. And you actually had people stealing the used ones to make like counterfeit.

• 1:06:39Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  So it's like olive oil from Greece was super expensive. So maybe you get like Spanish olive oil producers stealing the Greek olive oil, like amphoras, putting their olive oil in it and then selling it for twice as much.

• 1:06:50Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  Like shit like that went down a lot. It was typical.

• 1:06:53Alie Ward?

  Poached.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:55Alie Ward?

  Oh my gosh, you got ripped off. Oh, man. So we didn't know how these huge amphoras were sealed. And also confession, I need to get off my chest. I used to waitress at this bar restaurant and the owner would refill the Tanqueray with Gilby's Gin, which is not good gin. And we had one customer who could always tell and would make me crack open a fresh bottle for her. And I always wondered if she was like a bloodhound in a human costume or a secret spy. But then again, if you put Pepsi in a Coke bottle and you tried to pull that shit on me, I would call the FBI. And I've never told anyone until now about that Tanqueray switch out because you know what they say, loose lips sink ships. We got a lot of questions about my dad's favorite song.

• 1:07:39Alie Ward?

  Megan Stingle, Gwen Zimmer, Vanessa Fry, Baloney Shoes, and Emily Stanislavsky, and also, I'm gonna guess my dad, Mr. Larry Ward. Wanna know, does everyone ask you about the Edmund Fitzgerald after finding that you study shipwrecks because the song is already stuck in, in my head? Gwen wants to know, is it your favorite song?

• 1:08:18Alie Ward?

  So yes, is, how many times have you heard it?

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Many times. I love Gordon Lightfoot. He was fantastic. Like, one of the greats. Yes, it's a fantastic song. I'm terrible with lyrics, so I had to actually like, sit down one day and actually look at what was being said because I used to play like music and I, between playing instruments and being a dancer, I was like, I don't listen to lyrics. I like have all this other stuff going on in my head. It was a fantastic song. And I think it's a great example of how broad maritime culture is because like, music is a huge part of it. When you look at sea shanties and whatnot, it's basically a sea shanty. It's like a love song to a ship.

• 1:09:02Alie Ward?

  So Gordon Lightfoot is a Canadian folk song hero. And he wrote this in 1975 after seeing just a little blurb in the back of a Newsweek magazine about the Edmund Fitzgerald, which sunk in a November storm. And Lightfoot recalled that they spelled Edmund wrong in the article, and he was just so sad that 29 lives, all crew members were lost, could amount to just a little afterthought in the news. So he wrote that ditty the next week, and the world has remembered her ever since. And the ship's victims remain with the wreck in the cold, cold, cold waters of Lake Superior, who they say never gives up her dead. It's cold enough that they stay pretty well preserved and wouldn't float up by decomposition. But

• 1:09:43Alie Ward?

  the bell of the Edmund Fitzgerald has been retrieved at the behest of family members and has been rung in memorials, some of which Gordon Lightfoot has attended. And he also set up a scholarship fund at Northwestern Michigan College, where two crewmen were cadets. So yes, Grand Pod Ward, he has good sea song taste.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  And it's like, it's not even a ship from like antiquity. It's like, You know, a freighter from the Great Lakes from like, what was it, 1875? Or like, something like that. It's like, it's recent. And I love that. I love that it inspired somebody so much to create this, like, absolute jam.

• 1:10:21Alie Ward?

  It is. What a bop. It's a bop of maritime antiquity.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Yes, it's fantastic. Yeah, I love any sort of sea shanties, though. Or just like, any song about the sea is fantastic.

• 1:10:33Alie Ward?

  It really makes me want to raise a mug of rum or something.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:37Alie Ward?

  We got a lot of questions. Marie Moss, Lungox, Rachel Selby, first time question asker, Lisa Bake, Aspen, Felix LaSalle, Jaclyn Watson, Julie Newgan, Kelsey Story, Katie, Kelly Henkin, Shelley Carr, all agog, Laura Stacey, Ira Gray, Benjamin, a lot of folks. Might even be missing some, I'll list them aside. Amisia Dole's, Sam Kilgore, Adam Palek, Sarah Feib, first time askers Luke, Samantha Norris, Paul Cirillo, and Alana Litten. These folks all asked about ship critters, and some more specifically. Want to know. Marie asks, what's the deal with shipworms? What are they? Lungox, not directly related to shipwrecks, but I'm very curious about shipworms.

• 1:11:21Alie Ward?

  And Lisa Bake wants to know, do any wildlife and animals take advantage of a shipwreck? So yes, tell us about what's living in them.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  So, so many animals and wildlife take advantage of them. So depending on where in the water column a ship has settled, and depending on what material it is, different organisms are going to be attracted to it. So obviously, like, shipworms are more attracted to wooden shipwrecks. They're like, virtually going to leave metal ones alone, because there's nothing for them to eat. Shipworms, what's the deal with them? They're not even friggin' frackin' worms. Like, start with that. They are the bane of most maritime archaeologists' existence. So yes, basically, these mollusks, misnomerous to the extreme, I hate it, I love it, whatever. So not worms. They originally lived, like... In what's called the latoral zone, so close to shore. And so basically, they would have feasted on not just ships.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  Obviously, it's not this organism that evolved just because of ships. They have more recently, in the sense that their distribution has broadened because of ships, because they were picked up from one area and deposited elsewhere. But they didn't come into being just because of ships. They just capitalized off of them. So, I mean, piers, anywhere, like you're in California, you've got those beautiful piers out into the sunset with Ferris wheels. Shipworms all over them.

• 1:12:43Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  People have to replace those timbers. Anything that's underwater because of shipworms, yes.

• 1:12:48Alie Ward?

  What do they look like? Kind of a pale, flabby hose, to be honest, with a pair of bony castanets on one end that they use to rasp their way through things. And they also have some feathery, gill-like fancies at the other end. And they might be a meter long, just a three-foot-long wood-boring dickbag. Wow.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  So they are virtually everywhere throughout the world. The only places, like the only waters that are immune to them, I will say, is at very high latitudes, so where it's too cold. And that is something that is changing with climate change, unfortunately. So ships that used to be beautifully well-preserved wooden shipwrecks that used to be like, we're like, yes, you guys are doing it. Like they're surviving the test of time. And like the North Atlantic, where I am, or the far south, we now need to actually monitor them and be careful about shipworms. And it's this whole thing, like, what do we do if they do make it here? So there's a few different things that you would do. It's like, shipworms, they need oxygen. And that's why the Black Sea is actually one of the few places

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  that's not super, super cold, that's immune to them. It's because you've got a very thin layer of oxygenated water near the surface. And then below that, it's like super anoxic.

• 1:14:06Alie Ward?

  Anoxic, not a lot of dissolved oxygen in the water.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  So the worms just can't survive. So if a ship sinks quickly enough in the Black Sea, it won't be affected by shipworms, or it shouldn't, unless that also changes with climate change, which is possible. I'm not an expert. But yeah, so if we cover shipwrecks with at least a few inches of sediment, they can't get accessed by these organisms.

• 1:14:33Alie Ward?

  But slathering wrecks. And sediment isn't a best case scenario. And Chanel says that if something is still fairly intact with tall, pokey masts sticking up, you'd need meters and meters of mud to cover that. But what types of other critters and plants see a shipwreck and are just like, lunch?

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Lots of organisms, like their entire ecosystems. Anything that needs a hard substrate to settle off of loves a shipwreck because you've got what's sort of an ecological desert. You'll have whole swaths of the seafloor that's just silt and sand, which has its own ecosystem. But none of these invertebrates that need this hard substrate that need like, you know, it's like putting down the foundation of a house. It's not really great in muddy water or like marshes. You need concrete sometimes. And then once these sort of reef ecosystems grow, bigger fish, reef fish, sharks, everything comes to it. Everything loves it. It's great. I love it. I'm like, come, come, enjoy.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  And then that like goes back to humans because, you know, a lot of times humans won't know why there's so much fish there, but local fishermen take advantage of that as well.

• 1:15:47Alie Ward?

  Oh, that's interesting that you'll kind of know, well, there's something sunk around here, which means there's got to be critters.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's sometimes like how we find out that there's a shipwreck. Like if you talk to like local population, like local fishermen, you're like, so where do you fish? Like, oh yeah, over here, there's always something hanging out. And you're like, yeah, okay. Rec. Cause like, if you know that the topography there is supposed to be 200 meters deep, there's got to be something attracting all those fish. It's a wreck, probably.

• 1:16:15Alie Ward?

  Oh my gosh, that's so fascinating. So the shipwrecks bring all the sharks to the yard. Now, what about the Bermuda Triangle? I feel like it's not fair to Bermuda to be mostly associated with all this drama. And patrons Monica, Elizabeth, Tyler Duggan, RJ George, Earl of Greymilken, Ethan Baton, Starr, Kinsley Wheatley, Nicole Kuha, Shalise, Deceal, Cagney. Happy anniversary to you and Marcy. You kids grow up so fast. First time question askers, Stacy Graves, Courtney Andrews, Maddie Reeves, and Hannah Lee all want to know, in Hannah's words, what do you Think about the Bermuda Triangle and all the ships that have disappeared there. Is it a magnetic force or is it aliens? LOL. A bunch of people want to know what's up with the Bermuda Triangle.

• 1:17:00Alie Ward?

  Is it really dangerous?

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  I have theories. I mean, probably like Bermuda.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  You know, I want to say that most of the people that got lost there probably didn't know their way around and were relying on equipment that was not built for the area.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Versus if you had like a local who knows how to navigate atolls and, you know, rocky changes in topography and everything else, they probably wouldn't get lost.

• 1:17:33Alie Ward?

  I like to entertain the idea of spookiness, so I read into it. And this terrifying theory that the area between Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico is a wreck magnet originated from a 1951 Paranormal Magazine. But experts say, nope, it's just a heavily trafficked shipping lane with sometimes crappy weather. It would be like saying a freeway interchange in a snowy city is haunted by space goblins. It's a fun way to live, but it's flim flam. Bruce has a great question. They ask treasure, is it finders keepers?

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely not. And that is a great question. Oh, man, ownership of the past, oh, so treasure finders keepers, absolutely not.

• 1:18:15Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 1:18:17Speaker 01

  Because you really do have to ask who owns the past. A lot of like shipwrecks from the 1600s onwards. Depending on where they're coming from, we have really good records of who actually owned those ships. If we can determine what that wreck is, like we go back to the insurance company. Like whoever put up the money to support that journey technically owns it.

• 1:18:37Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  If they don't, then more than likely it's the property of the crown, like whoever's nation it was that sent it out. If not them, then it's the nation whose territory it falls within. If not them, then the nation of whosever's goods were on board.

• 1:18:56Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that becomes like when you've got these like Spanish doubloon cases found off the coast of Florida.

• 1:19:02Alie Ward?

  A doubloon, side note, is a Spanish coin, like what you might picture a treasure chest just filled with. They are shiny, they're typically around seven grams of gold and ornately stamped, and they can be worth thousands of dollars each. And it's speculated that the treasure coast of Florida is hiding $400 million of these doubloons. And I just realized that if someone made a video game that was just called Florida, it would rip in every way. So much excitement. But yes, who owns this booty?

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  Like that because of this huge international thing because the US wants title to it and Spain wants title to it. So yeah, a lot of, a lot of people in line to get any potentially sunk treasure before the divers stumble across it.

• 1:19:52Alie Ward?

  I imagine there's gotta be people who are like, let's not tell anyone about this.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, sadly. And I sort of hate social media for this because I see it a lot.

• 1:20:01Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:03Alie Ward?

  Who's posting about it?

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. So I, and I try to be good about it. I try to be educational and not snobbish. And so this is one thing I will say, if you are diving, if you want to be a wreck diver, something that they will not teach you in the courses, but which is your responsibility, in my opinion, is to know the laws around the area where you're going. Most wreck divers are super awesome and like they're very interested in history. I hate that there's like this subset of wreck divers who are so desensitized to it that they don't even think of wrecks as a piece of history. And that could be because like a lot of times you train on scuttled wrecks, so purposefully placed wrecks that you know are safe. So then they go to like World War II wrecks in fantastic places like Hawaii and whatnot.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  And they don't realize like, that's a war grave. Like even though the US doesn't have the same laws as Britain, like that's still someone's resting site. I've seen even like random fountain pen groups where somebody picked up a fountain pen off of a World War II wreck site. And you're like, oh, my two passions combined. I'm like, oh, leave it, leave it, please. Take pictures, believe it. Yeah. And they're like, oh, I kept it. I'm like. And that's the big thing, too. Super nerd here. Fountain pens have a lot of different materials incorporated into them. Lots of different types, metals, plastics. All of those components need specific conditions for conservation. So you can't just throw the whole thing in like sterile water and just let it do its thing.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  Like each of those needs to be treated separately. So taking it out of that environment and putting it in your, like on your office desk, it's gonna fall apart pretty soon. So you're not helping anybody by taking it. It's tempting for sure, I know. Cause everybody sees something, they're like, oh, this is so cool. I want a souvenir. It's like, please, just take pictures.

• 1:21:57Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Not to mention, no one needs an extra ghost. You know what I mean?

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely not.

• 1:22:04Alie Ward?

  I don't need a sailor ghost being like, why'd you take my pen? Why didn't you leave my pen? You know? I don't need a curse.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  Sometimes that'd be super awesome because I would love to have somebody to chat about. I'd love to like hear all their stories. But absolutely not, don't need a curse.

• 1:22:19Alie Ward?

  Don't need it. Don't need it. 2020 was enough. I'm good. Stacy Graves, first time question asker, wants to know if there's anything unique about shipwrecks in the Great Lakes versus ones in the ocean. They're from Michigan and she says she knows there are a ton of shipwrecks here. She's also heard about a Michigan triangle. What's up with the Great Lakes?

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  Great Lakes represent, so I'm from Southern Ontario. So Great Lakes is like my closest big body of water.

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  It's, uh, so the big thing is that it is pretty much its own sea. People that are not from the Great Lakes region hear about the Great Lakes and how many shipwrecks there are there and they're like, what the heck dude? It's like a pond. I'm like, no. You can get massive swells. You can get horrible weather conditions. Like it's cold. I dove on the east coast of Canada and I've dove in the Great Lakes and the Great Lakes can be colder at times because it's like freshwater and thermodynamics is a thing.

• 1:23:14Alie Ward?

  Fun fact, so freshwater freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, but seawater freezes at about 28.4 because of the salts in it. Also, because of the westerly wind in the Great Lakes and the displacement of lower colder water at the bottom of the lake, the west coasts of the Great Lakes tend to be colder than the east coasts. So you're not imagining it. And yes, as we learned from the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, those Great Lake waters are not smooth sailing. They can have swells up to forty feet high.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  It's rough conditions. Like, it's a great place to learn to sail if you want to be a good sailor. Versus like sailing in Greece where it's sunny and wonderful weather. I don't know about our Michigan Triangle, but absolutely tons of shipwrecks there. Another really cool thing about Great Lakes exploration and why there's so many shipwrecks there is because it was, a lot of those shipwrecks are from a like period of transition. So we were switching from sail to steam. We didn't just go straight to metal ships. We put steam engine, like we retrofitted sailboats with engines and boil furnaces and everything else. So when these shipwrecks sink, they're so heavy that they sink very quickly. And this improves their preservation.

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  So that's part of why we see them longer and we think there's so many more. It is a smaller area, so the like density of shipwrecks is smaller compared to like all the seas and oceans of the world.

• 1:24:41Alie Ward?

  It didn't even occur to me until probably like 10 years ago that there were shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. Like, I only consider them in the sea, which is absolutely bananas. And yeah, then realizing that there were a lot of them, I think I came across one of those pictures. In Clearwater, you can see this sunken wreck and it's like, oh, why is that so fascinating?

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  And then on top of that, shipworms can't survive there. So any wood shipwrecks that we do have are super well-preserved because it is cold. It doesn't have the same sort of currents and like even metal shipwrecks can survive very well in the Great Lakes because it's non-salty, where like salt is worse for metal because it helps it corrode more quickly. So it's really good preservation conditions. So yeah, it's just like shipwreck on top of shipwreck and we just hear so many tales about it. So it seems like there's a heck of a lot and there are, but yes, very, very cool area.

• 1:25:33Alie Ward?

  Ooh, Olivia Meyer, first time question asker, goes by Liv, asked, what did a typical day look like? And just in general, for a maritime archaeologist, do you have any advice for people who want to get into this field?

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  Okay, so you do not need to dive to be a maritime archaeologist. If you do dive and you want to be involved, and even if you don't, but you want to learn about it, a great organization to look up is the Nautical Archaeology Society. It's based out of Portsmouth in England, but they have, they run programs and they have sort of, I guess, offices all over the world. And they have like a tiered education system. So you can do like the level one, it's literally called the level one, level two and level three. Their premise is to teach recreational divers how to be helpful to archaeologists. So A, how to be good divers around archaeology, and how to be potentially useful to be able to volunteer,

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  like teaches you the basic excavation and mapping skills. And the other things I would say to divers who want to dive near shipwrecks of any sort, if you don't want an archaeologist to hate you, basically, have good buoyancy control. And have like, so there's something called trim in archaeology. So you basically want to be very streamlined. You don't want to have your arms hanging out from you dragging on the floor. You don't want your fins to be dragging on the seafloor. Because you typically want to be like two feet above, two, three feet above whatever you're looking at. And you don't want something to be hanging two feet off and just like bashing into everything.

• 1:27:05Alie Ward?

  So what is a typical day like for a maritime archaeologist?

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  It can be spending a day in the archives, like looking at records from the 1500s of what ships went into quarantine when, and like who contracted the plague and whatnot. Yeah, it can be a lot of grunt work. It can be a lot of carrying around tanks, a lot of sitting at a computer, definitely. But yeah, every day can be different, which is fantastic, which is why I like it.

• 1:27:32Alie Ward?

  Oh, Megan McLean had one other question. After getting scuba certified this year, they say, "I wanted to donate money to an organization that helps people of color have access to the sport, and I found Diving with a Purpose."

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  Yes, love Diving with a Purpose.

• 1:27:42Alie Ward?

  Whose goal is to provide education and training in submerged heritage preservation and conservation projects worldwide with a focus on the African diaspora. Do you know anything more about how shipwrecks are connecting marginalized folks to their heritage, Megan asks? Are there any ways that recreational scuba divers can help with preservation and science? But it sounds like that to that organization.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so NAS. Yeah, NAS is a great sort of learning body, and then working with divers with a purpose or any other sort of other organizations is a great way. A lot of maritime, like especially something that's close to shore, they'd be happy to, depending on the site, like depending on how sensitive the site is, if it's a military grave, maybe not, happy to have volunteers typically, just talk to people. Another fantastic organization, because Diving with a Purpose is amazing. Another fantastic organization is Black Girls Dive, and that's like a double whammy because black people and people of color in primarily white places are stigmatized against these fields, and women have this added difficulty because it's a very physical

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  field a lot of time. The men that we might be around might say that we don't deserve or shouldn't or can't be in those realms. So fantastic double whammy of an organization. Definitely, shipwrecks are a huge way to reconnect with our heritage. It is a great tool that we have because indigenous cultures typically around the world have a fantastic oral history. Their knowledge of locations of potential wrecks, even those that aren't of their culture, is so much better than sometimes what our written records might be in certain areas, especially in colonial regions. Indigenous cultures seem to have

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  a lot less shipwrecks, and I'm going to chalk this up to being smaller ships and also having better knowledge of the areas that they're navigating. So that says something about colonial practices in terms of knowledge of navigation and just like button themselves where they don't necessarily belong. I won't say anything more about indigenous populations because I don't know it and it's not my place. But absolutely, I think a lot of people who... I mean, so I have somehow ended up working primarily with World War items and onwards. And there's so many people that lost their lives on them that, you know, their grandkids never met, for example, and being able to work with those groups and reconnect

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  them to, you know, find a resting place or just like, can you imagine never being able to have seen your parents' grave? It's, it's something. Um, so that is like, super meaningful, in particular about minorities. I would say, watch the enslaved docu-series. It's touching, it will make you cry. Um, and that is very much about the Black Diaspora and looking at the slave ships that didn't make it to shore.

• 1:30:37Speaker 05

  More than 12 million Africans were enslaved and trafficked. More than 2 million of our ancestors died at sea. The ocean holds stories that haven't been told.

• 1:30:48Alie Ward?

  So definitely watch that film instead of an Ancient Aliens episode about like, the lost mythical city of Atlantis.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  I'm honestly impressed there hasn't been an Atlantis question yet, because that's normally like, my biggest rant.

• 1:31:01Alie Ward?

  I'm, wait, hold on. Let me see, let me see if I missed it. Atlant? Let me see. Okay, three people asked about the Atlantis.

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  Okay, I, I have, thank you, you have restored some faith in humanity, that like, it's not on everybody's mind.

• 1:31:17Alie Ward?

  Uh, Ashley E. wants to know, what's the deal with Doggerland? Is it the real Atlantis? Sarah Hunt says, how realistic is the science and history and engineering shipwrecks of the animated Atlantis film? And Bellatresa, first time question asker, do you entertain theories of the Bermuda Triangle, or Atlantis, or other fun nautical conspiracies? So yeah, Atlantis, let's talk about it.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  Um, I hate it. I love that.

• 1:31:45Alie Ward?

  Hate it.

• 1:31:46Speaker 01

  I love the animated movie. I have to admit, I have not seen it in like, 15 years, and I really should. So I can't say how accurate any of the engineering is, but if I remember correctly, it was like, super sci-fi, like, um, super steampunk, and so I don't feel like it's super accurate. Now, we've all heard of a legend of Atlantis. Pure fantasy. Well, that is where you be wrong. That young thatch gets crazier every year. I can prove Atlantis exists. I'm sure of it this time. But yeah, honestly, Atlantis is probably my biggest like pet peeve as a young person that's on social media. Like, this isn't, this isn't a thing that only I get. But like, you know when people like slide into your DMs type thing?

• 1:32:30Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  They see maritime archaeologists and they go, so tell me about Atlantis. And they think that that's gonna intrigue me. I'm like, no.

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  Or they, they ask me if I'm just a treasure hunter. I'm like, no.

• 1:32:42Alie Ward?

  Oh geez.

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  Block. Yeah, Atlantis probably doesn't exist. And people like to say like, oh, but every myth has some proof. So I have to stress Atlantis, there's one actual record of Atlantis existing. And it was from a Plato fable. So something that he openly admitted was like fiction. It's not like a recount of some war. It's like, his fables were very well known to be fiction. They were supposed to be narratives that people could learn from. And so the whole theory was that this Poseidon worshipping city angered Poseidon somehow and was dashed, like destroyed and sent into the abyss. There's no mention in Plato's story of people actually

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  living underwater. Like, it's just not there. So to me, like, people still get fascinated about like, these big topics like Atlantis and Titanic. And it's painful to me that there's so much money going into it. Just go to Discovery Channel or History Channel and like, look at how many finding Atlantis, Atlantis resurfaced, like, so many, like, how many times can we find this place? And I'm like, just invest that money somewhere else. There's indigenous cultures, there's, you know, vanishing seaside communities, there's like, traditional boat building techniques that one person in an entire country still practice. That's where we can invest that money. I'm like, it's so damaging to other cultures to be fixated on these super charismatic, possibly fake, or overstudied sites. I'm

• 1:34:12Speaker 01

  sorry to anybody whose dreams I dashed.

• 1:34:14Alie Ward?

  No, I think it's good. I think that this is necessary flimflam that needed debunking.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  Yes, please stop sending me messages about it, random people who I don't know.

• 1:34:26Alie Ward?

  Okay, so if that is one of the most difficult things about your job, what's another thing that is difficult or petty, anything? Anything that sucks?

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  The smells. Can I say that? Like, people are gonna hear this and think like, wow, what a girl. But no, it's like, it's such a pungent profession. Sometimes it's wonderful, like, old books smell amazing. But like, okay, I've been on research festivals with guys, like, predominantly male crews, who are just working for eight hours a day. Like, because I was on a site that was over 100 meters deep, and the guys were excavating, and then they were coming back up. And so, they dive in these dry suits. So you're sweating inside of it, it's quite warm. And in a wet suit, you know, your water flushes you out. And in a dry suit, it doesn't do that. So your sweat, musk, just lingers.

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  So, you know, then you open up the suit, it's like, whoo, wow.

• 1:35:26Speaker 01

  And like, the thermal stuff that you wear underneath takes ages to dry. So if you're diving every day, you're not washing your thermals until you're done diving. One site I was on was like, really close to landfill. So if you've surfaced, and like, you've just been breathing out of a bottle for four hours, and now, you surface and the wind hits you just right, you're like, yum.

• 1:35:49Alie Ward?

  Oh, yikes.

• 1:35:51Speaker 01

  Probably the worst. So, this deep wreck where I was working with the people that were diving in dry suits, I was working on the material that was surfaced from the year before. So because it's so deep, you don't excavate the way that you would on land. Like, you don't look for artifacts as you go. They basically were just like, shoving everything in the hose, vacuuming it into this ginormous vacuum bag that holds like, tons of sand. And then on land, we like, sifted out later. And because we didn't know how small the stuff we were gonna find is. So I actually found this tiny little piece of wood, which was the first piece of wood we'd found on that shipwreck. Um, so super exciting. And because we found this pretty small piece of wood, they're like, okay, start looking for like olive pits or grape seeds and all this other stuff.

• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  So we're like literally taking sand between our hands and rubbing it to make sure we don't miss anything.

• 1:36:40Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  And I came across this sand-covered bundle of slime. I have no clue what it was. I would guess like anaerobically decomposed because of the smell. My supervisor, he's like, just, just smush it. You can't, you can't like just throw it aside. Like you need to make sure there's nothing in there because it was like this like heft of some sort of slime. And it smelled so bad. Like I washed my hands so many times and it still smelled bad. I went home and I like covered my hands in toothpaste.

• 1:37:11Alie Ward?

  Oh, no.

• 1:37:13Speaker 01

  Smelled. That's probably the worst.

• 1:37:15Alie Ward?

  Oh, what did it smell like?

• 1:37:18Speaker 01

  Oh, I can't even like really, really, really bad like sulfur farts. Like, because there was like methane. Um, I'm pretty sure because that's why I think it was anaerobic. Because I could definitely smell like the methane-y sulfury part. But plus like an overtone of fishy, plus something that had been sitting out in the sun for like months. Because this had been in the sun for so long. Like, that's the thing. It was in this big pile of sand in the sun for like

• 1:37:44Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  Months and it hadn't dried out. So there was no like skeleton. There was no like scales. It wasn't like a dead fish. It was just slime. So I have no clue what it was.

• 1:37:55Alie Ward?

  Oh, God.

• 1:37:56Speaker 01

  Like, I don't know, a dead squid, maybe?

• 1:37:58Alie Ward?

  Maybe.

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:38:00Alie Ward?

  Seasnot. It was just a ball of free-floating ocean mucus.

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  Hagfish there. So like, I don't know, but, but yes, oh my gosh, it was so gross.

• 1:38:09Alie Ward?

  Oh, God. So what is your favorite thing about maritime archaeology?

• 1:38:15Speaker 01

  So two things, I guess. Um, because I definitely love being around the sea and like even just getting to look at videos from like marine life. I pretty much am doing my dream that I had as a kid. So that is like the best thing ever. But then the other thing is getting to work with communities and giving back to them. Because I did get to sit with someone while they saw the shipwreck that their grandfather had died on, uh, which was a submarine wreck, like for the first time, first time it'd been seen in seventy-five years. Like, that is amazing. And getting to Do Skype assigned is like getting to actually make something accessible to people where it's most people aren't divers. Most people can't travel to fancy locations and dive on this on history.

• 1:38:58Speaker 01

  I'm actually working on a project to make sites like accessible to people who don't have the typical abilities to see it. So like the visually impaired is my primary focus. Everybody's response is like, okay, we've got 3D models. It's like, okay, well, COVID, we can't go to museums. We can't hold these 3D models. So everybody's putting things online, but if you can't see these shipwrecked images, that doesn't help you. So getting to work with those communities and fill in those gaps is probably the best.

• 1:39:28Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow. I think that's so amazing. I just, I know that you have a very long career ahead of you.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  Fingers crossed.

• 1:39:38Alie Ward?

  So ask maritime scholars doofy questions because chances are they dedicated their life to this stuff because they actually like talking about it. So you have nothing left. Also, follow Chanel Zaffaropoulos at Sharks and Rex on Twitter. And by that I mean Blue Sky. She's also at Sharks and Rex on Instagram. Her website is linked in the show notes, too, and she sells beautiful postcards of her photography there. I'm just going to plug it because she didn't, and I think her photography is beautiful. There's links to all of those in the show notes. We are at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Ally Ward with one L on both. If you want to join our Patreon, it's at patreon.com/ologies. Thank you, Erin Talbert, for managing the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Yardwire does the website.

• 1:40:23Alie Ward?

  Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Susan Hale managing directs the whole show. Our two regular editors are Jake Chaffee and Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. But this one was first edited by Stephen Ray Morris, and the encore was stitched together by Jared Sleeper of Mindjam Media. Nick Thorburn made the theme music. And if you have stuck around, I see that you have, for a fresh secret in this one. Is a tiny bit, just a little tiny bit of behind the scenes from last week's Fallon segment, which aired on May 14th, 2025. And yeah, it's on YouTube. If you want to see me put a really, really large cat eye mantis in Salma Hayek's hair, she loved it. So this segment came about after like years of chatting with one of the producers, Patrick Morelli.

• 1:41:06Alie Ward?

  And the timing had never quite worked out because I was always traveling, but we started chatting about potential bugs to feature about a month ago. And I was like, that would be great if it happened. I'm not going to tell anyone. I'm not going to get my hopes up just in case bugs get dashed at the last moment. But they didn't. So I got the call on Friday that I needed to be in New York a few days later to tape on Wednesday. And in the meantime, I wanted to go out a couple of days early so that I could go to the American Museum of Natural History and meet the bugs that we were going to show on TV. And big thanks to everyone at the Natural History Museum there and the Gilder Center in New York, particularly Dr. Jessica Ware, who is a dragonfly expert from the odontology

• 1:41:49Alie Ward?

  episode. I can't remember if I said that right. Dragonfly expert. Her episode's amazing. So I got to hang out with them in person. I got to meet a bunch of people at the museum. I got to meet the bugs. And the segment featured this huge stick looking mantis. There was a Hercules beetle named Marty. There was a big fat juicy grub. There were some emperor scorpions that glow under black light, like all scorpions. We have a scorpology episode you'll love. And then also a goliath bird eating tarantula. And a few things that got cut, since this is a secret at the end, in case you saw it, but just extra facts that didn't make it to air. One of them was that male Hercules beetles, they'll duke it out

• 1:42:31Alie Ward?

  if one comes into another's territory. And they'll like battle kind of face to face, like they're dancing until one of them picks up and body slams the other like Hulk Hogan style. And then the loser has to skulk off and not get the girl. And then this other cool fact that got cut was this whole millipede segment in which I got to share that female millipedes have like a neck vagina essentially, and they birth an egg out of their neck. And then they roll a little piece of poop from their butt all the way up their legs, like like up hundreds of legs. And then they just tuck the egg into a swaddle of poop. Also, I doubt you care, but if you do, some people were like, oh, cool outfit. And my wardrobe inspo was Rachel Weisz and The Mummy.

• 1:43:15Alie Ward?

  And that's kind of a fashion style known as light academia. Although dark academia is also very much my vibe. Google them, great styles. Also, I was up until like 3 a.m. the two nights before we taped finishing up last week's spiders episode, which is why this one is an encore. I'm a little fried, which I'm sure you ought to stand and forgive me, I hope. Also, I would like you to know that right after the taping, I went to dinner. I got absolutely hammered off of one cocktail. I was like, I'll have a celebratory one. But I had been too nervous to eat all day. And then I was like, woo, that was enough. And then after dinner, I went to a different restaurant and I had a whole other dinner and three desserts. And it was the best day.

• 1:43:59Alie Ward?

  Okay, that's it. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.

• 1:44:34Alie Ward?

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• 1:45:18Alie Ward?

  I wouldn't have started ologies. It was one of the best investments I've ever made. And if you're like, I don't know where to find a career coach. I can help you. You need an experienced pro who asks the right questions, sets you down a path where you're most likely to succeed. And that's what you can expect from a coach at today's sponsor strawberry.me. This is so cool. They match you with a certified coach who's been vetted to work closely with company founders. And yeah, sometimes I'm like, oh, wait, that's right. I am one. And if you're founding a business, even if you're along the way and you're maybe stuck in a rut, or you have to make a decision about expansion, or what direction you want to take your company. That's what I did. I went to strawberry.me and I was like, okay, can you help me pare down some stuff?

• 1:46:01Alie Ward?

  I think I have too much on my plate. I'm not sure what to say yes to, what to say no to. And they were super helpful in helping me streamline and now I get to sleep more and I enjoy that. So get the help every entrepreneur needs. Go to strawberry.me/ologies. That's strawberry.me/ologies. You're the boss.