Archaeologists have made hundreds of new finds on the wreck of HMS Erebus, the ship commanded by Sir John Franklin on his doomed Arctic trip 180 years ago. The team’s discoveries include pistols, sealed bottles of medicines, seamen’s chests and navigation equipment. These are now being studied for clues to explain the loss of the Erebus and its sister ship Terror, and the deaths of the 129 men who sailed on them.
I've read a lot about this expedition (both non-fiction and Dan Simmons' amazing horror novel based on the facts), and visited the Naval College at Greenwich to see the memorial to the lost men. It's a truly fascinating story.
The work is considered to be particularly urgent because the wreck of the Erebus – discovered 10 years ago in shallow water in Wilmot and Crampton Bay in Arctic Canada – is now being battered by increasingly severe storms as climate change takes its grip on the region.
Does climate change have to be shoehorned into everything in the 'Guardian'? Well, at least it's not covi...
Investigators’ efforts were made even more pressing by Covid-19, which halted all exploration in 2020 and 2021...
/facepalm
Virtually all this work has focused on the threatened Erebus. By contrast, Terror – which sank in deeper water about 45 miles away from the wreck of Erebus – is less at the mercy of the elements and was only visited briefly last year.
Time to explore that one too, then.
So how was exploration affected by Brexit? We need to know.
ReplyDeleteBut Climate Change is making the sea deeper, isn't it? So why is the wreck subject to growing risk? It couldn't be that the Alarmists are just making it up as they go along?
ReplyDeleteHow did they manage to sail so far through the thick Arctic ice?
ReplyDeleteMaybe the archaeologists will find the huge sleds the ships were secured to go enable them be pulled over the thick pre global warming ice.
I need to know how diverse the crew were and how many stripes on the flag were represented.
ReplyDelete"...is now being battered by increasingly severe storms as climate change takes its grip on the region."
ReplyDeleteThis is quite a common trope at the moment. Since the run away warming, dangerously rising sea levels and ever expanding deserts and millions of displaced people failed to materialise. Now the claim is that every kind of severe weather is on the increase, this is quite simply not true.
I just came back to mention that the data on weather trends is publicly available so nobody needs to take my word for it. Any media outlet that says that severe weather is increasing, either globally or more locally, is lying.
DeleteThere's a theory, (not about globule worming), that The Goodwin Sands, off East Kent, which have claimed several hundred ships over the years - probably thousands, may well re-join the coast at some stage. You can sometimes walk over the sands at low tide - even play cricket for a short while on special tidal days!
ReplyDeleteIf that becomes the case in the next century or so, archeologists will have a field day, digging down and finding all that gold, silver and a few sundry bones...
"So how was exploration affected by Brexit? We need to know."
ReplyDeleteHeh!
"But Climate Change is making the sea deeper, isn't it? "
Who can say, anymore?
"Maybe the archaeologists will find the huge sleds the ships were secured to go enable them be pulled over the thick pre global warming ice."
They were amazingly constructed for operation in those conditions, with a sort of 'central heating' system on at least one ship.
"I need to know how diverse the crew were and how many stripes on the flag were represented."
😏
"Now the claim is that every kind of severe weather is on the increase, this is quite simply not true."
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the trend for naming every storm makes us think there are more of them now?
" You can sometimes walk over the sands at low tide - even play cricket for a short while on special tidal days!"
Sometimes the sea DOES give up her dead...