These posts make more sense when read in order.
Please click here for the first article in this series.
The ocean is vast. When you’re out on the ocean, in every direction you look there’s nothing but sky and water. It can be calm and peaceful, but if there’s trouble, you can feel awfully alone. The ocean is so vast that you could be hundreds or thousands of miles from assistance. A simple accident can snowball into a life-threatening situation and unless you can radio a nearby ship for help, you’re on your own.
It’s not known how many ships have simply disappeared without a trace over the centuries. Crews and passengers disappear without explanation. Lloyds of London maintains a detailed registry that list more than four thousand missing vessels—mostly Western ships. Some were lost during wartime, but no one knows what happened to them. They’re just gone. Even with today’s satellite radios and global positioning devices, ships are still vanishing.
Many things can destroy a ship. Single rogue waves up to 112 feet (34 m)—as tall as an eleven-story building—suddenly appear out of nowhere and hit ships, lighthouses, and oil platforms. They can form in just eleven minutes and slam into a ship at forty-five miles per hour (72 km), exerting more than eighty-five tons of pressure per square yard (100 tonnes or metric tons per m2)—more than enough to tear open a huge ship’s bow.
A German scientist who works at a research center that tracks this, says an average of two large ships vanish every week, while in the twenty years from 1978 and 1998, at least two hundred supercarriers—each more than 220 yards long (200 m)—were lost.
Gigantic rogue waves that can sink ships of more than 200 thousand tons (180,000 tonnes) are probably the most common cause of these losses. Pirates and mutineers sink ships to destroy evidence of their crimes and murder people so there won’t be any eyewitnesses to testify, but it would be extremely difficult for them to sink really large ships.
We all know that icebergs and sea ice can be a threat to ships, but in 2001, Australian researchers discovered that methane bubbles rising from the ocean floor can sink ships. Under the large pressures of the deep, methane takes a solid form, but parts can break off and turn to gas. A ship over a large bubble or far enough away would be fine, but if it’s in between, it can sink. Many small bubbles, like those in champagne, can remove a ship’s buoyancy so any ship over these bubbles could suddenly go straight to the bottom.
There may be other dangers that we don’t yet know about.
Sometimes derelict ships are found with no one on board. Other times ships are found containing dead bodies, with no explanation as to what happened to them. Here is a short, and far from complete, list that I compiled, along with the years they were found. Some had been drifting for decades.
Cargo ship Seabird (1750), cargo ship Octavius found with frozen crew (1775), merchant ship Rosalie (1840), the Hermania (1849), bark James B. Chester (1857), merchant brigantine Mary Celeste (1872), sailing vessel Resolven (1884), Abbey S. Hart with three dead and one insane (1884), bark Freya (1902), Marlborough with twenty skeletons (1913), schooner Zebrina (1917), cargo steamer Baychimo (seen twelve times between 1931 and 1969), the John and Mary (1932), trading schooner Gloria Colite (1940), the Rubicon with only the ship’s dog onboard (1944), schooner City Belle (1946), freighter Ourang Medan claimed to be found with a dead crew (1947 or 1948), yacht Evelyn K. (1948), small cargo ship Holchu (1953), the merchant vessel Joyita (1955), yacht Connemara IV (1955, broke from its moorings during a storm with no one on board), trimaran Taignmouth Electron (1969), sailboat Ocean Wave (1976), the Ortac (1976), cargo ship Hawarden Bridge (1978), fishing vessel Sea Lure (1983), merchant vessel Hemingway (2000), the Tropic Bird (2001), the Robert Croll (2001), fishing boat High Aim 6 (2003), tanker ship Jian Seng (2006), a small unnamed yacht with eleven corpses (2006), schooner Bel Amica (2006), catamaran Kaz II (2007), shark fishing vessel Ho Tsai Fa No.18 (2008), sailboat Lunatic Piran (2009), 283 ghost ships found near Japan mostly from North Korea (between 2011 and 2015), a Japanese fishing boat (2012), shipping vessel Lyubov Orlova (2013), yacht Sayo with a mummified man sitting at his desk (2019), cargo ship Alta (2020), and freighter Fin Shul Yuen (2022).
No doubt most derelict ships don’t make it into the news. Some are abandoned because it would be too expensive to repair them or they’re just too old. Others fell victim to some unknown accident, storm, or disaster.
 |
| The stern of a sunken ship. NOAA. |
Posts
