Largest underwater shipwrecks

The history of sea voyages is strewn with dramas, the traces of which rest on the seabed today. Among the biggest wrecks are unsinkable warships and luxury passenger ships. Some of them have gone down in history as the most tragic disasters at sea with thousands of deaths. There are also underwater wrecks whose contents still thrill.

Undersea cemeteries

350 nautical miles off the coast of Newfoundland, the wreck of the world’s most famous ship rests at a depth of 3840 meters. The Titanic on its first voyage from Southampton to New York in 1912 collided with an iceberg and sank along with more than 1,500 passengers and crew. At the time, it was the largest passenger ship in the world at 269 meters in length, and on board were valuables that still generate much excitement today. Not surprisingly, exactly 100 years after the tragedy, the wreck was protected as a UNESCO Underwater Cultural Heritage.

An almost identical wreck is sunk at a depth of just 122 meters, 2 nautical miles off the coast of Kea Island in the Aegean Sea. The Britannic was launched 3 years after the Titanic tragedy, but was used as the largest floating hospital in the world as World War I unfolded. In 1916 it hit a German mine and went down within an hour. Fortunately, most of the more than 1,000 passengers were saved.

A year earlier, the British transatlantic liner Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine 11 nautical miles off the coast of Ireland. The 239.9-meter-long ship had just sailed from New York with 1,960 passengers on board. The unexpected German aggression claimed nearly 1,200 lives, 128 of whom were Americans. The tragedy reinforced the US public’s support for joining the war. The wreckage is at a depth of 93 meters, and its hull is beginning to disintegrate.

Largest military wrecks

The warfare sank a huge number of ships, on which civilians also died. The biggest maritime disaster in history was the torpedoing of the German ship MS Gustloff by a Soviet submarine in 1945. The death toll at the time was around 9,000 passengers, including Poles, Lithuanians and Latvians evacuated from Germany. The wreck of the Gustloff haunts to this day – as one of the largest such objects at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, it provokes questions about the possibility of toxic leaks as corrosive materials degrade.

Among the largest military wrecks are also two of Japan’s brother ships, the Yamato and Musashi, the heaviest and most heavily armed vessels of their time. Both measured 263 meters and had a displacement of 73,000. tone. The American-attacked Musashi sank in the Philippine Sea at a depth of more than 1,000 kilometers – its wreck was only discovered by American billionaire Paul Allen in 2015. It was much easier to find the sunken wreck of the Yamato, which is located at a depth of 340 meters, 180 miles off the Japanese island of Kyushu.

Treasures and self-destruction, or controversial shipwrecks

On the sandy bottom of the Atlantic, between the coast of South Carolina and Bermuda, more than 5 km below the surface of the sea, rests the wreck of the only super aircraft carrier ever sunk. Paradoxically, measuring more than 300 meters in length, the ship USS America was deliberately sent to the bottom by the US military. The vessel, built in the 1960s, served the Navy in Vietnam and during the Persian Gulf conflict. As part of her retirement in 2005, a series of bomb and torpedo tests were conducted on her to test the endurance of super aircraft carriers. The controversial sinking idea sparked opposition from a wide range of war veterans.

Even more exciting, and has been for more than 100 years, is the wreck of the British transatlantic liner RMS Republic. In 1909, the 173-meter-long luxury ship collided in thick fog with the Italian SS Florida and sank off the coast of Massachusetts. On board were coins valued at a staggering $10 billion. So far, the treasure remains buried 82 meters below sea level, and there has been a fierce court battle over ownership for the past four decades since its location. In 2025. plans to extract valuable cargo.