Black Sea '01 Expedition


Overview
Intro to the Black Sea
The Flood Theory
The Flood Theory (pt 2)
> The Shipwreck Museum
Past Expeditions
The 2001 Expedition


THE GREAT
 SHIPWRECK
 MUSEUM
"We don't know if
 we'll find ancient
 ships with bodies
 still inside."

Due to the enormous anoxic zone in the Black Sea, essentially no life can survive in its depths. Now, if you were an underwater archaeologist and I just told you that there is a giant sea in Asia with no oxygen on most of the seafloor, the propeller on your hat would start spinning so fast you would hover -- because no oxygen means no creatures around to devour archaeological remains.

TEREDO WORMS
In most aquatic situations, ancient shipwrecks on the seafloor don't look like ships (with hulls and masts and all that nautical paraphernalia), but mere piles. That is because tiny creatures in the sea, some not visible to the naked eye, eat all the organic matter that's left on their plate (the entire seafloor). Not only do we have hungry bacteria (the same kind that decompose things on land), the sea is also home to a particularly unfortunate yield of evolution called the Teredo worm. This mollusc consumes wood like a starving monkey in bannana heaven. If you submerge a log in the ocean for a week, when you pull it up you'll find significant holes bored out of it. Multiply that weekly effect by 52,000, and you see that there probably won't be anything organic left from a Roman shipwreck (see the picture below). Even the famous Titantic, which sank less than a century ago, has been largely relieved of her intricate deck molding and grand staircase by the hunger of these ravenous little Teredo worms.

That's why most ships in the planet's oceans which foundered (sunk) more than a few hundred years ago are void of any organic remains today. The wooden hull and structure of the ship itself are gone, along with much of the cargo and (of course) the remains of the poor sailors. All that you will find where the battered ship touched seafloor is a pile of ceramics, some metals (which the saltwater hasn't otherwise consumed by corrosion or a similar chemical hooligan) and other inorganic material. For Roman wrecks, this heap is called an "Amphorae pile" (because amphorae are the pointy-ended vases used as shipping containers by the Romans). When archaeologists look for ancient shipwrecks, they search the sonar screens not for massive skeletal hulls, but for squat piles of cargo.

EXCEPTIONS TO DECOMPOSITION
Now, there are situations in nautical archaeology when the hull of a sunken ship pushes through the mud of the seafloor, and this mud covers the wood thick enough to alienate the oxygenated waters and keep the Teredo worms out from the feast. It is due to such a muddy immersion that the luxury cargo and hull sections of the 14th century BC wreck at Ulu Burun -- one of the most jaw-dropping shipwrecks ever discovered -- was remarkably well-preserved. (We'll discuss more details of Ulu Burun shortly.)

What we have in the Black Sea is one giant anoxic zone, where Teredo worms and normal marine bacteria can't survive, and thus organic matter won't decompose nearly as much. It would be like immersing everything in the mud that preserved much of Ulu Burun.

AN IN-SITU SHIPWRECK MUSEUM?
Back in the 1970's, the oceanographer Willard Bascom suggested that the anoxia of the Black Sea could house an astounding collection of intact ancient shipwrecks. He argued that crafts from throughout history that foundered here actually sank into a natural freeze-drier of sorts (not too dry, though), where they were preserved for thousands of years.

Direct investigations of the Black Sea's depths have only begun recently. We don't know if we'll find ships from the second millenia BC with sails and lines still on them, with food still in the galley, with ancient clothes still in the seachests. And we don't know if we'll find human remains from over 4000 years ago, still intact, preserved eeirily since before Rome was built (in a day), the Old Testament was written down, Homer told stories of the Trojan war -- and possibly (there's no reason why not) these poor sailors may have been sitting on the seafloor since before the pyramids were constructed (presumably by aliens), before Uruk and the first cities were founded, before agriculture was invented, before civilization, before history.

The Black Sea's anoxia is like Mount Vesuvias, which preserved the city of Pompeii: in both cases, people and architecture were frozen by acts of immense natural violence. But in case of the anoxic zone, victims have fallen into this spider's nest of preservation not just in one day, but from throughout recorded history. It also so happens that the Black Sea was a major crossroads of the ancient world. So not only do we expect to find well-preserved wrecks in the Black Sea, we expect to find a lot of them.

See a gallery
of artifacts found on
Ulu Burun
AN ANCIENT HISTORY MUSEUM?
 Ulu Burun was a stellar example of the fact that it is not really the ships themselves that are of the greatest archaeological value at a wreck site (though we do learn a great deal about ancient ship construction, which we don't know much about). Instead, the cargo of ancient ships often yields the most extraordinary finds. Ulu Burun was a luxury ship that sank off Turkey (in the Mediterranean, not the Black Sea) almost 3500 years ago, carrying incredible riches. Almost a decade of laborious underwater excavation recovered the oldest writing tablet (book) ever found, an Egyptian scarab, Caananite jars, multicultural jewelry, enough bronze weapons to outfit a small army, a trumpet carved from a hippopotamus tooth, and even a game piece from a sort of board game played by the ancient sailors on the ship. What we learned from the excavation even had an effect on the dating of Homer's Odyssey.

When organic cargo is anoxically preserved (like the hippo tooth horn), it is much better preserved than when artifacts are left out on land for millenia, where they are exposed to the air and thus quickly devoured by scavengers and microbes. So, in light of the potential for cargo discoveries, not only do the world's oceans in sum comprise the greatest ship museum in the world -- they might make up the greatest history museum of the ancient the world, with cargo, tools, raw materials, crew amenities, (possibly) human and (certainly) architectural remains captured from across time. One of the first wrecks excavated after the invention of SCUBA proved to be a Greek ship carrying Roman statues and artifacts. You can see that the potential for discovery is extraordinary.

BLACK SEA ARCHAEOLOGY
We honestly don't know how much is lying at the bottom of the Black Sea right now (go to the next page for a review of what we've found so far). But looking at the bathymetry (such as a depth map of the Black Sea), it's clear there is an enormous volume of deep water in the Black Sea, and therefore a huge chunk of anoxic zone where artifacts and untold tales of history could be hiding.

It remains to be seen whether or not the anoxic zone has actually served curator to the peerless ancient museum of the world. But if Indiana Jones were a real person alive today, dollars to donuts he'd be on a research vessel in the Black Sea, dragging a sonar towfish and joysticking an ROV in search of ancient ships in the dead zone.
ORIGIN OF THE ANOXIC ZONE

So far, we have discussed two completely separate facets of the Black Sea: 1) Ryan & Pitman's theory of an abrupt flooding through the Bosphorus and 2) the preservative effects of the anoxic zone. But here's the funny thing (at least, I think it's funny): the two lines of research are actually related.

Remember way back 8,000 years ago, when the Black Sea was a giant lake? First of all, we said earlier that anoxic zones are not uncommon in large bodies of water, so it's entirely possible (if not to be expected) that the old Black Lake would have had an anoxic zone of its own, simply because it was so deep. But this lake anoxic zone would've been nothing like the queen of all anoxic zones we find in the Black Sea today. This latter, unusually large dead zone has a different origin than the others in the world.

If Ryan & Pitman are correct, when the frozen blankets of the Ice Age were melting about 5600 BC, all this seawater from the Mediterranean burst into the Black Lake. Well, the salt in that water settled into the lake like fish food in an aquarium, because the heavier salt diffused down.

So you've got all this salt towards the bottom of the Black Sea, and not so much on the top. This created two layers with different densities: a salty layer on the bottom and a smaller, brackish ("slightly salty") layer on top. (There's also a transition zone in between, but don't worry about it.) A cross-section of this layer structure would look like vinegar and water giving each other the cold shoulder in a bottle of salad dressing, or the wonderful spectacle of a "Black and Tan" beer, which features Guiness on top of Bass. (In the Black Sea this beer configuration would be flipped, with heavy on the bottom -- as if the drink were poured by a bartender-in-training.)

In these analogies, there is a boundary or waistline between two non-mixing layers, what's known as an "interface". In each case, the interface is blurred by some kind of transition zone, but you can look at it as a real boundary (in the Black Sea, you will even get reflection of sonar waves off it).

Eventually enough salt came in from the Mediterranean and the interface (meaning the density differences between the layers) prevented the salty bottom from mixing with the brackish top. Throughout the world, seas and freshwater bodies are oxygenated by circulation (see Introduction to the Black Sea). But the density difference between the salty lower layer and brackish top prevents them from mixing with each other. The warmer top hogs all access to the surface (like a bratty younger brother) and therefore, the cold bottom is completely cut-off from oxygen.

Badda-bing: anoxic zone.

At some point in ancient history, primitive man got off his rear and got into the ocean shipping business. Then (badda-bing) the Black Sea started to accumulate artifacts for the Great Shipwreck Museum. It just goes to show you that chemistry, while hands-down the most boring subject in high school, does have its moments.


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