Underwater on Bermuda’s Montana Shipwreck – 180 | National Geographic

I'm dr. fleet Max Rouge I work for the Bermuda government overseeing the shipwrecks that surround this island every one of them has an incredible story to tell now I've been the custodian of historic wrecks for the islands of Bermuda for about just over a decade now there are over 300 shipwrecks around this island which is actually quite incredible because it's not that big a place which means that pretty much anywhere you swim you're gonna bump into a shipwreck they form an integral part of our national identity it's one of the Bermudas most iconic shipwrecks there's actually two shipwrecks laid on top of each other you have the constellation that came afterwards in the Montana the debris from the constellation is washed right through the center of this shipwreck so you have a very confounding set of artifacts you have some from the 20th century and some from the 19th century everything's that are rolled into one it's a really historically relevant shipwreck it was part of the fleet of these blockade runners that ran very quickly to feed the Confederate South with weapons during the Civil War this was an iron ship she had large paddle wheels on either side and big engines in the center and so a lot of that is still completely intact you can still go into parts and the shipwrecks and have a look around but the bow just completely occluded by hard coral the stern is nestled down between reefs that have clearly grown up around it because it's pretty shallow and because it's pretty rocky you can imagine those hard corals would have settled on it pretty quickly this is how nature wants to be on this shipwreck you know there's been no interference that's actually one of the things we're trying to accomplish is in monitoring these shipwrecks we can actually measure to some extent how fast coral grows and you know with a changing environment with our concerns about climate change how coral responds and how coral grows is a pretty important thing and so these shipwrecks also a really great opportunity for us to establish a start point and decide from there how long it has it has it taken for sensing nature to take it over these unfortunate human events actually art simply absorbed by nature and turned into another one of its beautiful phenomenon these shipwrecks are sort of part of historical narrative to tell us but they also have important to science function as they operate is kind of like a you know a benchmark if you want in the environment so for how things have changed up until now and how they're going to change going forward and because they hold our interest they're also a really important segue to getting people to care about the marine environment you

Channel: National Geographic

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Keywords: national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, nature, culture, documentary, perpetual planet nat geo, Montana shipwreck, blockade runner from 1863, 300 shipwrecks, Bermuda, Hard coral and reefs, coral growth, coral growth by monitoring the shipwreck, scientists, Bermuda’s Montana Shipwreck, blockade runner, Off the coast of Bermuda, PLivjPDlt6ApTqKN6DbR-GOM5omen0Xm2a, PLivjPDlt6ApRiBHpsyXWG22G8RPNZ6jlb, PLivjPDlt6ApRq22sn082ZCC9893XtV8xc

Id: ly2lpRkBbC8

Length: 2min 47sec (167 seconds)

Published: Wed May 29 2019