The Ancient Shipwrecks Of The Black Sea | Lost Worlds: Deeper Into The Black Sea

[Music] the sea for me has a Fascination I like being on the sea I sleep better on a boat I like the smell of it the taste of it so it's somewhere where I'm [Music] happy yeah the there is 261 M 261 world as the RV moves in there's always this moment the green Haze of water gradually resolves into this shape and you start seeing Timbers I feel that this uncontrollable sort of surge of excitement finding shipwrecks like that is breathtaking you thinking I wonder what this just going to [Music] be sailing East at 6 knots the 3,000 tons strill Explorer heads into the the mysterious Waters of the Black [Music] Sea she's making for a set of coordinates off the Bulgarian [Music] Coast on board an international team of scientists led by John Adams one of the maritime archaeologists who raised King Henry VII's Flagship the Mary [Music] Rose we have some good target areas that we would like to get a little bit more information but these are the selected locations and what we've done is we've given the coordinates to the bridge we're steaming off to do the first one now more used to battling the storms of the North Sea for the oil industry the high-tech Scandinavian survey vessel will be the operational centerpiece of the Expedition Bri yeah SEC on okay 10:15 okay we're heading straight towards where we said we'd [Music] be explorer was incredible oceangoing Servo vessel with all the systems that anybody could possibly need if I was to design a vessel an equipment to do deep water archaeology this is [Music] it for the the next 4 weeks home Family Life on land will take a back seat in a quest to uncover the story of the Black [Music] [Music] Sea this vast sea was once a prehistoric Lake unconnected to the world's oceans how it then flooded remains disputed some scientists have argued there was a catastrophic Deluge which inspired the biblical flood story along its Shores they found evidence of early humans who settled here worked the land discovered gold in the Sea's hidden depths archaeologists believe there may be evidence of ancient seafaring shipwrecks from long lost Empires that could date back 3,000 years to when the Greeks first landed on the Black Sea Shores until now this sea has remained little explored flanked by six countries the Black Sea was for much of the 20th century hidden behind the Iron [Music] Curtain for the next three years John Adams and his team will search for evidence of the Lost civilizations and the ancient peoples who lived and sailed on this mysterious Sea and the whole area is is an archaeological hotspot in terms of what we know about ancient civilizations along its Shores and in theory we would expect tremendously exciting remains from past cultures underwater as well Adams's right-hand man is KW bov one of the few Maritime archaeologists ever to have worked on a Black Sea shipwreck this is really going to sound cheesy but we really are making history the ship RS that we're likely to find there are thousands upon thousands of years of seaf fairing in this region and we know virtually nothing about it Helen far specializes in prehistory uncovering the worlds in which ancient peoples lived understanding that human narrative against the backdrop drop of this changing landscape of sea level rise it's really important for understanding where we've come from who we are what makes humans humans it's something that people really engage with managing the team's state of the art imaging systems is maritime archaeologist Rodrigo Pacho [Music] Ruiz the Black Sea has never been explored this way it's it's Virgin Territory there's there very very little Arch done here you know this is the biggest Museum in the world and he's all on the water so a lot of exciting stuff ah here's John are we are we ready fish my estimate is about another 30 35 minutes excellent good all right are you ready for Co side Joy Jo St Explorer St explor uh Just for information we're conducting subse operation can you keep clear of us Oneal mile please okay I will be clear of you one the strill reaches the coordinates where sonar has located a signature at 300 M but what's down there no one is sure alongside the scientists is a team of deep sea surveyors equipped with the latest laser and sonar technology and six Pilots for the remotely operated vehicles or R link to the ship by a fiber optic cable the supporter ROV can reach depths of nearly 2,000 M gliding through the water with a touch of a joystick you ready yes ready ready take it away guys all stations are we off deck [Music] Bridge uh confirm I have a green light for diving yes you have thank you conad Adams's command post is the ROV Pilot's cabin the supporters eight cameras will open a window to an Undiscovered World calibrating the camera getting the lights right okie dokie coming down as it descends the supporter gets closer and closer to what makes the Black Sea unique at a depth of 150 M oxygen in the water disappears The Sea becomes a dead zone yeah the is 261 M 261 Ro come on guys discover the past with exclusive ancient history documentaries and adree podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from history hit watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device download the app now to explore everything from the wonders of pompe to the rebellion of buddika and the mysteries of prehistoric Scotland immerse yourself in the captivating stories of this remarkable era by signing up via the link in the description [Music] oh my that camera stunning my God look at that oh this is beautiful oh this is absolutely beautiful much of the wreck has been preserved the wooden ballustrades around the quarter [Music] deck the ropes for working the sails in other Seas most of this wreck would not have survived that's quite a lot of roope oh yes that's brilliant look at the M leaning against the beam yeah absolutely absolutely but have you seen the carving oh The Carving it's all over the place absolutely beautiful the carved patterns of flowers and Vines are Islamic the ship would have sailed during the utan Empire probably around 300 years ago [Music] it's just unbelievable it's just unbelievable I just you have you ever seen it no no no not not live not not doing it now it's it's down there 300 M we are discovering it we are looking at it now for the first time three centuries ago the Black Sea was a prized possession of the Ottoman Empire Merchant ships plied their trade along its Coastline a vital supply line for the ottoman Capital Constantinople today's Istanbul within a century of its capture close to 700,000 people lived in this teeming City feeding the growing population was a priority for the ottoman rulers ports at the mouths of the Great Rivers that fed into the Black Sea from Russia and Europe were vital trading posts and were quickly captured an armada of small Traders be began to Ferry vital supplies back to Constantinople some ships their hulls Laden with grain from the bulans precious metals from the Caucasus never made it home in theory shipwrecks that come to rest on 300 meters of water should be well preserved but we didn't really know so the first time we started to see that ottoman wreck that was a moment it really is like this and we can see wonderful things all over the bottom of this sea [Music] potentially the expedition to the Black Sea began 12 months earlier on a Greek survey ship the EO Adams's mission was to settle a scientific argument that has divided archaeology for decades how the Black Sea flooded [Music] using a sonar device called a toe fish which emits powerful pulses of sound the team surveys the sea Flor the sound pulses penetrate the seabed feeding back a detailed profile of the prehistoric landscape than once existed 20,000 years ago the Black Sea looked very different in the grip of the last ice age Global sea levels were much lower and the Black Sea was a smaller freshwater lake early humans probably lived and hunted on its Shores at the moment we're more or less steaming over the Paleo Shoreline in other words from here in that way towards the land of Bulgaria which we can see in the Horizon everything was dry land most upon all all [Music] time for decades most geologists agreed that as the Ice Age ended fresh water from the surrounding Rivers poured into the lake over thousands of years it slowly filled up eventually the lake reached the Bosphorus and began to mix with sea water from the Mediterranean creating the Black Sea that exists today then in 1997 the theory was challenged by two American scientists Walter Pitman and William Ryan they argued that there was little change to the prehistoric Lake until a few thousand years ago when the rising seawater level of the Mediterranean burst through the Bosphorus the theory sparked huge public interest recalling Noah and the biblical flood in 3 weeks of surveying with the toe fish the team creates a map of the ancient buried landscape the first step in uncovering how the Black Sea formed using a second toe fish the team begin a new search this time they're looking for shipwrecks in most oceans ancient ships have long disappeared they wooden Timbers eaten by shipworm as on this 2,000-year-old Greek wreck but in the Black Sea because oxygen below 150 M disappears the water is anoxic it doesn't support life such as [Music] shipworm it could mean that ships from Long Ago Empires still might exist on the seabed [Music] this is the first one that really sprang out of the screen as screaming shipwreck even if it's recent this could actually be a really really interesting find and this is the deepest one almost 300 M 278 this one's very interesting that's really good you've got collapsed beams and all sorts of things you've certainly got what looks like structural Timbers all the way around yeah in a way I think it's the most interesting the strill is heading further out to sea to deeper water where the team hope that older wrecks may still lie untouched for perhaps thousands of years you can never tell where the ancient shipwrecks will be but we go down below 150 M preservation becomes dramatically better and so if you're looking for ancient Ship Wreck look in the deeper water you might get lucky and find some really early [Music] stuff online and R this is Bridge vessel in position ready to start whenever you are copyop L open stand by stand standby the rec signature they'll inspect will take the ROV deeper than it's ever been before 1,800 m a 40-minute Journey to the seabed my personal favorite on the wish list is the medieval Byzantine shipwreck if we find one of those ships I'll be very [Music] [Music] happy there is there it is yeah this definitely looks like uh the 17th century Eastern Mediterranean cargo vessel that would explain the straight STM post like the earlier find the ship is from the ottoman period from 2 to 300 years ago okay as well cathx ready for cathx yeah cathx is one of the R's highdef cameras which photographs the wreck in minute detail and it's part of a revolutionary method of surveying wrecks in deep water called photogrammetry we capture a series of Stills at a frame rate of 3 every second so from these wreck we managed to get 700 folks so that's a lot of high resolution photography the software Stitch it together basically and you start getting a much better idea of details of the ship the levels of Technology have become so Advanced the things that we used to dream of as methods of threedimensional recording things underwater with speed and accuracy now they're here so to to certain extent you can do an awful lot sitting in a control brand with a cup of coffee in one hand and a joystick in the other it's fantastic with the image now stitched together the team have the precise dimensions of the ship can record every Timber and in this case identify every artifact that might otherwise stay hidden from the photogrametry model there appears to be an object wedged under a Timber near the stern of the wreck you see him yes sir stand using the fiber optically controlled manipulator arm the ROV Pilot Brien gar Begins the challenging process of retrieving the artifact there's an old expression that archaeologists don't dig up things but people but it's the things that allow us to get to the [Music] people we are faced with the material evidence the immediacy of that is what fills your brain initially and then we start thinking about the people and wondering what happened most of those shipwrecks out there there's no obvious reason that they sunk they're on the bottom of the sea they probably went down in bad storms it would have been a very dark situation to be in well [Applause] done what we're looking at is two Clay brazers on the left one we see traces of burning and traces of concreted ashes and charcoal which comes to show that you know the brazer was actively used in fact when we discovered it it was still full of ases so yeah this brazer probably contained the remains of the last meal that was eaten on board the boat [Music] you're talking to these people they suddenly become live they are right next to [Music] you for K bachvarov ships are the closest possible connection to long lost Empires a way to understand the past and its people for more than 2 years he's been working on the Vasa a 17th century Swedish warship if you study the ERS properly you're going to see the marks from the tools you will learn to recognize their signature on the by the way they use their tools bov has been painstakingly examining each Timber of the ship's frame carefully reconstructing how the Vasa was built is the first time that we really developing an understanding how the Shiites put her together there are not two Timbers that are exactly the same above the ship or that are even universally squared the capability of dealing with complicated engineering problems this is telling us something about the mental state of these people how much they understood the forces that were acting upon their ships how did they solve the problem of creating regularly operational vessel that was safe that made it sure that it will bring its cargo and preferably also its crew back home at the end of The Voyage in the case of the Vasa disaster struck on its maiden voyage human error causing it to sink before it had left Stockholm Harbor when it was raised 60 years ago archaeologists found that the ship buried in sediment had been largely preserved seeing the ship the first time was the closest to a religious experience that I've ever had to me it was entering a cathedral medieval Cathedral Gothic Cathedral that sense of a that overwhelming feeling has never left me the bridge just good we okay to start operations and we wasn position for over two weeks the strill has been at Sea scientists surveyors and ROV Pilots Working Day and Night must be hard to keep in touch with your daughters Ying yeah this is life at Sea sort of it when you have the time to call uh they might be doing something else that's nothing you can do about it Mommy hello hello you miss me I dude you miss me yeah I heard that a auntie dandelion came and painted your fingernails she tired to be honest he's kind of normally she'd be asleep at the moment was okay okay bye the hunt for shipwrecks goes on right 10 me to go but the team is struggling to find anything older than Ottomans from around 300 years ago uh not another one oh yeah same old same oh Dam there it's yet another one it's another one to add to our Fleet I think it's a it's a smaller example than some of the bigger ones that we've seen but it's the same generic type it's disappointing none of the discoveries are the ancient Rex Adams had hoped the deeper anoxic water would hold go ahead survey we not just this [Laughter] sh you hear the official designation of this of this sort of ship the AA wreck because it's they're all the same when they come virtually flat [Music] packed each inspection takes time time as much as 6 hours it's eating into the schedule they can't take shortcuts every wreck could be the ancient ship they're looking for priced at $20 million the Expedition has high expectations of making ancient discoveries in these case there's so much money involved there's so many people involved as well and there's a lot of stress there's a lot of tension there's only one chance it's uneconomic to get it wrong basically at these scale it's a lot of pressure there's a lot of pressure to get it right yeah right same stuff bloody hell that's what it is archology is like that you just have to work with what you have but um it would be nice to have have uh something else dear oh dear okay time to leave the crime scene y time is running out John Adams needs more than Ikea Rex he also still has to determine exactly how and when the Black Sea flooded it will take much of the str's resources and many days of ship time surf C thank you you can lower it C go down armed with last year's map of the buried landscape the team select specific sites on the seabed to [Music] core 6 M Long Hollow tubes are lowered onto the seabed then pushed into the soft mud once extracted they'll contain a core of sediment that could date back tens of thousands of years this is fantastic a full 6 M of Consolidated set great what you're looking at here contains all the evidence for how the environment was over the time and how it changed over time and that will hopefully help us to address some of the big debates when it happened how it happened and what effects it had on the human populations living in the region at the time 73 sites of been selected along the shallow Coastal shelf and further out in deeper water the team hop the CES contain evidence of the prehistoric Lakeshore the first step in understanding when and how the inundation [Music] happened there you go not too bad it's a nice shell material bit of shell yeah in this core thick mud sits at the top but further back in time towards the bottom mixed in with a sediment are pieces of shell they could be evidence of the Lake's prehistoric Coastline oh yes so we see that and we GOA that looks familiar that looks like a beach why is that underw waterer it's ancient Beach from before it got submerged so if I can understand where that Coastline was then we can start looking at that Coastline and thinking about it what was the geography in the past of the Black Sea with 73 cores to extract every hour of daylight is precious and that means the search for Rex has to go on on through the night online can you um just set up the r on the on the line heading to in the early hours of the morning after 3 weeks at Sea the team finally finds a new wreck signature I'd given up and gone to bed because i' been up for about 24 hours and learned all the phone rings so they said John John do you want to see something different we're going do a couple more flyovers with the soon just to just to indulge me wide angle please yeah sure and just a touch higher perfect perfect okay off we go that eeriness of the MK just sticking out of the darkness incredible beautiful stuff Ken yes do I see tool marks on that stem can we just can we just take a little bit of a lower look down the as we come around the new wreck isn't an ottoman it's older 500 years older a merchant ship most likely built in Italy we're looking at date I me I think probably 1 1200 to, 1400 something like that and we find pictures of them or reliefs carved in churches and things but this is the first time anybody's seen anything like this the thing for real almost intact it's amazing [Music] it's the sort of that Marco po might have sailed on when the Great medieval explorer Marco Polo returned in 1295 to Venice from 24 years in the East he traveled home by sail his last sea leg was across the Black Sea on a ship much like this [Music] then you start thinking well the last time that that ship was seen was probably the last time those people saw anything what would that have been like for [Music] them must been terrifying suddenly it becomes about a group of people's very real demise and then we were finished and the ROV just drew back suddenly I thought there but the grace of God go away [Music] lifting a wreck of this age to the surface would cost tens of millions of dollars 3D photogrametry means they don't have to archaeologists now have digital tools with which to explore the Rex long after the ROV has left the seabed that little Mediterranean ship probably built in Venice or somewhere like that gives us a way into history that we can't get by any other means if you look at the ships in northern Europe in the 1500s like the marry Rose that's the other end of the process so the Mediterranean ship that we found is the before and the merry roses the after the West jib West Roger stand by J West that's that way John Adams began work on raising the marry Rose in the late 1970s it quickly became the biggest Maritime archaeological project ever undertaken and revealed the ship as a unique document detailing life in medieval England I can picture myself as the it was yesterday being inside this amazing structure all the guns were still in place at the time we found them and there were shot and ropes and long bows and all sorts of other stuff lying around in fact you could swim at one point from one end of the main deck to the other past all these guns looking down at the guns still pointing out through the gun ports and it was just the most amazing experience the more we learned about the ship the more it surprised us the Ingenuity of the way in which the internal space was organized and that the fixtures and fittings and the rig and all the other equipment including of course the guns the Ingenuity of how to create this complex floating Society in this structure of thousands of components you know this was a this was a new thing for Europe at the Time Medieval Europe was changing from a patchwork of small city states to powerful Nations ruled by monarchies Henry VII personally paid for the construction of the Mary Rose a potent symbol of his and England status ships can be seen at this period as the tools of State Building because they're now the new form of Castle they're floating castles you can take your power where you want them now when we look at that Italian ship in the in the Black Sea that is the stage of Maritime technological development before this process of technological change happens 19,000 artifacts were uncovered from the merry Rose each one had in to an intimate portrait of Life lived 500 years ago a shipwreck is an accident and it's a floating Society therefore it contains not only the ship ITS Technologies its fixtures its fittings its rig the personal possessions of the crew uh their equipment you've got this whole complex structure and all the objects of those people on board when you look at a ship Road you have the best way of getting at the people that is possible really 5 m and 332 very 55 M at 332° them them back on the strill something's gone wrong with the latest dive could you come to stop on the vestel and we'll see if it gets it in again C there now there is uh really really bad C so I will try to turn yes guys yeah could you do a fix on me now Bri say again please yes Bri Bridge yeah yeah you need to now this is a critical situation we're trying to get up and I need you to speak up on the coms please 500 M down there's a problem with the ROV we lost our Hydro acoustic positioning it's there but it's not coming up it's red and it's through a dep so not too sure that's happening don't TR us this position because we definitely we not getting anything in uh the supporters positioning Beacon has broken there's several million dollars worth of submersible out there somewhere we have a loot of 760 M of cable now and we are only 470 M under the boat so the current is pulling on the L the curent has dragged the ROV nearly half a kilometer out to sea but in which direction no one knows can't really see the cable there uh Ian can you get one of the guys on the bridge to go out and uh have a look on the umbilical cable and tell me which direction it's uh going if the supporter is lost it'll put a stop to the expedition's hunt for Rex yeah we have your positioning about 400 m from the v l we need to track back to the v l Flying Blind all Brien gar can do is slowly reel the ROV back on board without crashing it into the ship's Hull you see now I'm coming up quite fast oh no it's say we will lose it we will lose it all SS are the open back I'm so relieved I had this horror of sort of going along with these sort of millions and millions of pounds worth of oh it's a you take that end the cing of the Black Sea in search of the prehistoric coastline is nearly complete most of the 73 cores have been extracted from the shallow Coastal shelf and from deeper waters they've all been sorted they now need to go back in the crate and away one will attract particular interest core 59 at the UK's National oceanography Center scientists from the Expedition have found evidence of the prehistoric Lake as you can see we've got almost 4 M of pure shell if we take a sample from here we have a real mixure it you can see that we have some slightly more intact some slightly broken and then we have this completely ground down shell within it and this is really where what's happened is wave energy and the dynamic environment has basically churned this around breaking them down into almost what looks like in some places like a sand and that's really good evidence that we're on the edge of the Black Sea Lake as it was [Music] then taken 60 km off the present day Coast the core gives a precise location of the pre historic Lake its shores would have been surrounded by tens of thousands of square kilom of dry land that is now submerged that takes you to pretty much where it begins to start dropping off into the real depths for Helen far the results could be evidence of how early humans might have existed on this land so that's a large amount of continental shelf here that would be possibly inhabited crossed by people that were looking for their resources that they needed to live the Black Sea was a great environment you've got rich Aries which would have had game and things to hunt you've got fish resources you've got Stone so you've got all the things that you really need to be successful now the scientists need to resolve how this vast expanse of prehistoric land flooded slowly or catastrophically would people notice it would that affect people's lives what about if it was catastrophic how quick is catastrophic all stations are way off deck there's a new find sitting in the shallow Waters of the Bulgarian Coastal shelf It looks interesting I'm refusing to get excited until I know that it's not a fiberglass replica that's fallen off a container ship on its way to a fair ground in Georgia or somewhere say I'm just you know did not going to allow myself to get excited I mean it it it could be all sorts of things it's just that it it looks as it could be [Music] special right we want to be in there somewhere cheers I be copy stand by [Music] seconds there he is it big something looming yeah here we go do when we came into the wreck you immediately got the feeling that this there's a wreck that had been down there many [Music] centuries so we had a ship on the seabed with structure still poking through the seabed more or less upright because the shape that we could see in the multibeam was symmetrical so it wasn't on one side it wasn't smashed up and the shape of it looked unlike sort of post medieval ship so we suspected it could be earlier okay so if we just pull back again and look at look down at the whole [Music] thing and what's this coming up here yes embedded in the sediment is an AER just a good an ancient clay vessel used for transporting wine and olive oil as we looked at it from more and more angles it became more and more obvious that it was some sort of Byzantine type which immediately puts it into the sort of you know maybe a thousand years old or something it's the oldest wreck they've found a merchant ship from the Byzantine Empire it's totally new page in history that we just St today I could not be happier it might be a thousand years old but no one can date the wreck precisely the aera could hold the answer if they can retrieve it they can date it more closely where we all of us for John Adams the bantine at 95 m is close enough to touch small be like which gases we would use how we and Diving onto the wreck would give the maritime archaeologist the chance to inspect the ancient ship firsthand you can do a lot with RS these days and of course you know photogrametry is a fantastic way of recording these things in three dimensions incredibly quickly but as an archaeologist to actually dive on a shipwreck site I always learn more than I could remotely um and I always understand more as a result going down there yourself just gives it an extra element there's an extra sort of ah I see I understand that but such a deep dive is [Music] dangerous let's go into small details like which gases at the safety meeting there are worries that the dive is too risky um 95 M substantial dive we have of course a medic on board for for any Earth damaged people divers and we have the safety divers that will also assist in this if the safety divers are hovering in 20 and a diver needs need to be recovered from the bottom or assisted what do we do between 60 and 20 M yeah that's that's the problem it's a bit tricky in this kind of situation the first thing you have to do is just to make the guy breathing then we'll see and go up a little bit because even we are full of ilium if you go up so fast you bring body you're talking about the diving equivalent of having a heart attack driving a car at 70 mph EXA if John Adams dies and anything goes wrong the entire Expedition will be [Music] jeopardized [Music] [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 307,424

Keywords: Ancient Underwater Sites, Black Sea Wonders Expedition, Deep Sea Exploration, Historical Maritime, Historical Relics, Maritime Mysteries, Mysterious Depths, Nautical Mysteries, Ocean Archaeology, Oceanic Expeditions, Oceanic History, Seafaring Civilizations, Seafloor Exploration, Shipwreck Exploration, Submerged Artefacts, Submerged Chronicles, Sunken Ships, Timeline - World History Documentaries, Underwater Archaeology, Underwater Discoveries, Underwater Treasures

Id: irjJFuy3myk

Length: 58min 57sec (3537 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2024