Ahoy matey, we’ve we’ve brought ye another ensmol’d episode of Ologies (which just means cleaned of filth and cut for brevity) this time on: Shipwrecks. We get to talk with maritime archaeologist and wreck nerd Chanelle Zaphiropoulos about her experiences with Shipwrecks, treasure, carbon dating, admirals worth admiring, ancient technology recovered from the depths of history, The Bermuda Triangle, and generally life as an underwater wreck detective.

Okay, so these are shorter, kid-friendly versions of classic episodes.

So we took them and we took all the swears out.

You can listen around your grandparents, perhaps work colleagues, whatever.

If you want the full length version of this episode, though, of course, it's gonna be linked in the show notes.

We also have more small-logies up at allyward.com slash small-logies.

Oh, hey, it's your wallet, which if I'm so important to you, why do you lose me all the time?

Allie Ward back with a watery historical episode of Ologies.

I've wanted to do this episode for so long.

Truth be told, I would love to revisit this ology again and again.

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.

She's so enthusiastic about the science and the culture and her approach to what lost craft represent in terms of history and lives, it's really beautiful.

I think you're gonna dig this archeologist.

Maritime archeology comes from mare, which means sea in Latin, and archeos, which is ancient in Greek.

And there are very niche differences between marine archeology, nautical archeology, and maritime archeology.

But this guest is technically a maritime archeologist.

And also this gives me an excuse to do more episodes on stuff that's underwater.

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, the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, her favorite ship captain of all time, your new favorite ship captain, and the life that blooms around tragedy.

So batten down your hatches and shiver your timbers for a chat with Maritime Archaeologist, Chanel Zafiropoulos.

My name is Chanel Zafiropoulos or Zap, whatever is easier.

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

Do they raise the ships off of the seafloor or is that very verbodim and it's like, keep it there?

You're going to hate me, but I'm going to say it depends.

Institutions and governments have different practicing policies in different parts of the world, and then it also depends on your interests and your budget.

So there definitely have been wrecks that have been entirely surfaced.

The Mary Rose was a 16th century English tutor worship that capsized off the Isle of Wright 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.

There are a lot of conservation issues, even if you manage to raise the funds to raise the ship.

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.

And then some it's like, no, it's doing more good where it is.

Everything in archeology has an equilibrium in terms of decay.

So it's going to reach a certain point where it's no longer going to decay underwater.

And underwater, actually, depending on 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 a offshore wind farm there.

You might want to just leave it because it's going to cost a lot and it's doing some good where it is.

Did 1 person find sunken treasure 1 time and then everyone's like, bunch of ships out there with gold on it?

Or was that an actual thing where their banks were like, in the hole?

I wish I knew more about pirates and whatnot.

I know a lot more about corsairs than I do about pirates.

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

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.

Yeah, so but 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 have been like, yeah, this load of pottery is going to fetch a pretty penny.

So it wasn't like all treasure, but definitely there, they did have literal treasure chests and they had 3 keys to these treasure chests.

The captain, I think it was the priest and then the doctor all had 1 key.

So you couldn't open it unless you had all 3 keys to make sure that the captain didn't steal from it because that was partially going to be your wages as your crew.

Did you know that Florida has a whole coast called the Treasure Coast?

Because 11 Spanish galleons 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.

Before, if a vessel sinks, someone's like, where is it?

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 or radar?

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.

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.

Definitely sonar makes it so much easier to locate things.

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, but back on topic.

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.

Did bad weather force it to take a farther south trajectory?

So it's like pretty much good luck trying to figure that out.

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.

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 a thousand feet.

And with the recent shipwreck news, I thought this might be a good place to chime in about something that comes up a lot when we talk about being down where it's wetter, down where it's better under the sea, and that is pressure.

So think about how heavy a pitcher of water is right?

Which is probably less than a single gallon now the deeper you go in the ocean The more water is above you and around you and all that water has a lot of weight So the deeper you go the more weight is pressing on you and the more pressure you feel.

And pressure can be measured in what's called atmospheres.

So 1 atmosphere measures 14.6 pounds per square inch.

And that's the amount of pressure we experience at the surface level of the earth from air, just walking around, living our lives.

For every 10 meters below the surface of the water, the pressure increases by 1 atmosphere.

And we can figure out how many atmospheres of pressure are at a given depth with some really simple division.

So we take the depth of the meters and let's say the deepest a person can dive is a thousand feet.

So 300 divided by 10 is 30 atmospheres of pressure.

So can you figure out how many atmospheres of pressure you'd feel at the bottom of the ocean where the Titanic is, which is

You can divide that by 10, but don't forget to convert to meters first.

So convert it to meters by dividing by 3 and then divide that by 10.

Most shipwrecks, do they happen because of weather, running around, icebergs?

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.

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.

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

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.

A lot of wrecks happen because of other wrecks.

Like if you think back to when ships had masts, like 1 ship goes down because you navigated wrong or weather or whatever, you now don't have 5 meters beneath you till the rocks, you have a few meters before the mass, the superstructure, all of that stuff.

There's so many, and they're such good questions.

Can I lob some patron questions at you in a lightning round?

but before we do a quick word about sponsors of the show, they let us donate to a good cause each week and the 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 archeology advocates.

So to find out more, you can go to divingwithapurpose.org.

A donation to them was made possible by some sponsors of ologies.

Okay, back to underwater nautical inquisition.

A lot of folks all wanted to know, what's the number 1 wreck you wish you could freely explore, but you can't?

Ruby asked, is there an El Dorado of shipwrecks, the mythical ship that has yet to be discovered?

Is there 1 out there that people are like, where is it?

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?

It's not like when a flight goes missing, you've got the black box radar for the last place.

So you do all this detective work before you can dive down to it.

And The Labelle is a classic case of 1 where this archeologist spent most of his career looking for it.

And I think like the year before he retired was when he finally found it.

So like 1 of my personal heroes is this Greek naval captain.

She actually went on to be like the first female lieutenant in the Russian Navy.

And she fought during the Greek war of independence.

She had a seafaring husband who was killed by pirates.

She took over his shipping business and had more boats build, 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.

Part of me is like, I would love to find any wreck that's associated with her.

Probably not going to happen, and that's okay.

But basically, because like wooden shipwrecks, when they're damaged in conflicts, so there's a few ways that can happen.

You either would try to damage their mast or their rudder so that they can't navigate.

And then 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?

So you don't actually want to like just destroy it to smithereens, which you see in a lot of movies.

A ton of people asked about age of shipwrecks, like how far back can we date them?

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 1 that everybody knows is carbon dating.

We can carbon date shipwrecks, some of them.

Depending on the age, you will decide how accurate that carbon date is, but which is still super cool.

So organic matter has carbon and C14 dating is only applicable to organic and some inorganic materials, but not applicable to metals.

But you can use it on things like wood and bones and leather and pottery and such.

Typically we can carbon date, but that's only 1 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.

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 15 different seasons, like 15 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 100 years before the date that it actually sank anyways.

So then there's all these other methods that we use.

And so 1 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.

So things like amphoras and bottles and coins all have very stylistic changes that are very unique to different places and time periods.

And that's 1 way that we can track the age of a shipwreck.

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 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.

So my site, I know it's only been there for 75 years.

I know that I have a rough estimate of the growth rate factors for all those organisms, you know, divided by 75 years.

So maybe the wreck is 200 years old, but the coral is a spry 50.

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

So you'll typically look at all these different factors, as many as you can, and crunch them together to figure out 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.

SONIA DARA Oh, that's some detective work.

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,

the most fascinating discovery or item on a shipwreck and why is it the anti-cathyra mechanism?

So the anti-cathyra mechanism is like often called the world's first computer.

I think there was 1 that they think was every 4 years instead of every 12 hours.

So they speculated that it tracked the Olympics.

I don't know the validity of that, but it also has evidence that it might be linked to astrological or astronomical dyslexics, so I get them confused.

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.

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.

you get into like the quantum physics of like knowing space, time, and everything else, how they figure this out.

Picture a box with brassy cogs and wheels and astrological symbols, but corroded and fused into 1 rocky blob.

So after its discovery by some sponge divers in 1901, it sat around for a few years because no 1 really knew or cared that this was possibly the first analog computer to predict eclipses and such.

But yeah, so that's a very, very cool mechanism.

That's cool because it's the only 1 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 gonna be the things that you don't expect, but anything that tells you about the daily life.

Because as an archeologist, we are interested in people's culture and 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.

I feel like it's not fair to Bermuda to be mostly associated with all this drama.

What do you think about the Bermuda Triangle and all the ships that have disappeared there?

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 the 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.

do you entertain theories of the Bermuda Triangle or Atlantis or other fun nautical conspiracies?

And people like to say like, oh, but every myth has some proof.

So I have to stress Atlantis, There's 1 actual record of Atlantis existing, and it was from a Plato fable.

So something that he openly admitted was fiction.

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 living underwater.

I'm sorry to anybody whose dreams I dashed.

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Smologies #24: SHIPWRECKS with Chanelle Zaphiropoulos