Pioneering Maritime Archaeology in Black Sea

Pioneering Maritime Archaeology in the Black Sea

An expedition mapping drowned ancient landscapes in the Black Sea is making dramatic discoveries. An international team funded by the Expedition and Education Foundation, a charitable foundation established to support marine research is surveying the Bulgarian waters of the Black Sea where thousands of years ago large areas of land were inundated as the water level rose after the last Ice Age.

The Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project, (Black Sea MAP) is investigating when this happened, how rapidly and what effects it had on human populations living in the region, questions that are still hotly debated. In order to do so, they are carrying out geophysical surveys to detect former land surfaces buried below the current sea bed and taking core samples to characterise and date them.

The team's research ship is the Stril Explorer, a state-of-the-art offshore survey vessel equipped with the most advanced underwater survey systems in use anywhere in the world. They are carried on two Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs): the Supporter ROV is optimised for high resolution 3D photogrammetry and video. The ROV Surveyor Interceptor is a revolutionary vehicle developed by the survey companies MMT and Reach Subsea. It flies at three times the speed of conventional ROVs and carries an entire suite of geophysical instrumentation as well as lights, high definition cameras and a laser scanner. In the course of the project, it has set new records for both depth (1800m), sustained speed (over 6 knots), and covered a distance of 1,000 km.

During these surveys, the team have also inspected more than 40 shipwrecks, many...