10. SUBMERGED VEHICLE MUSEUM
In 2019, Jordanian authorities lowered 19 decommissioned military vehicles into the
Red Sea in hopes of attracting divers to the nearby resort city of Aqaba.
The collection of drowned machinery includes tanks, an ambulance, a military crane,
a troop carrier, a combat helicopter, an anti-aircraft battery, and several guns.
They’re arranged in a tactical formation along a coral reef 92 feet (28 meters) below the waves.
The project was the brainchild of the Aqaba Special Economic Zone
Authority (ASEZA), which has turned to wreck diving in recent years as a way to draw visitors
and their money. In fact, most of the wrecks around Aqaba were sunk on purpose.
The tradition of deliberately scuttling vehicles also stems from the Jordanian
royal family’s passion for diving, which goes back generations. In 1985,
the Late King Abdullah ordered the sinking of a Spanish cargo vessel called the Cedar Pride.
Three years earlier, an accident had blasted a hole in the ship,
leaving a half-submerged eyesore until the king decided it belonged on the bottom of the sea.
In 1999, an anti-aircraft tank became the second intentionally placed wreck off Aqaba.
There are also a few sunken airplanes, a landing boat, and a crane barge.
9. MONSTROUS EXTINCT SEA SCORPION
During the 1990s, an Australian man named Nick Freeman discovered the fossil of a sea
creature on his family property in the rural Queensland town of Theodore. He alerted staff
from the Queensland Museum, who weren’t sure what kind of animal the strange fossil belonged to.
They had never seen anything like it before. They ultimately chucked the specimen into
the “too hard to identify” category with plans to revisit it when they had time.
This opportunity to study fossil “cold cases'' arose during COVID-19 related closures in 2020
and 2021. The team identified it as a member of an extinct group of invertebrates known as sea
scorpions. Dubbed Woodwardopterus freemanorum, it’s the only sea scorpion ever found in
Queensland. Despite its classification as a sea scorpion, it lived in freshwater lakes or rivers.
The species probably reached over three feet (1 meter) in length.
It would have been one of the largest predators in its environment.
W. freemanorum lived around 252 million years ago.
It was the last-known creature of its kind to exist anywhere in the world
right before the end-Permian extinction event that killed off 90 percent of the planet’s species.
The ability for experts to carry out long-awaited
work that sat on the back burner until the pandemic hit is one of
the few upsides to the disruptions that the COVID-19 virus brought to the world.
8. LONG-MISSING CAR & PERSON
Alberta Leeman of Gorham, New Hampshire disappeared almost 44 years ago in 1978.
Investigators believe that she was on her way
home when her 1972 Pontiac Lemans vanished seemingly into thin air.
Over the next 40 years, numerous searches failed to yield any sign of Ms. Leeman or her vehicle.
In 2018, the case was assigned to a team led by Fish and Game Conservation Officer Joe Canfield.
They researched the disappearance and spoke with retired law enforcement officials who worked the
case and decided to search a specific part of the Connecticut River in Lancaster, New Hampshire.
Using new sonar equipment acquired through federal funding, the team
finally found Alberta’s long-missing vehicle. Inside were human remains.
According to the last update, the remains hadn’t been identified,
but the license plate on the car matched the one connected to Alberta’s vehicle,
strongly suggesting that her body has been recovered. No foul play is suspected, but the
discovery marks the first step in bringing closure to Alberta’s surviving family members, including
her daughter, Nancy, who stood on the shore of the river during the most recent search for answers.
7. ANCIENT EGYPTIAN WARSHIP
At its peak around 2,400 years ago, the ancient city of Thonis-Heracleion was
Egypt’s largest port. Its ruins are submerged in Abu Qir Bay off the Alexandria Coast,
where archaeologists discovered a wrecked warship last year.
Found beneath the crumbled ruins of a destroyed temple and 16 feet (5 meters) of clay, the ship
dates back to Thonis-Heracleion’s final years of existence. The 82-foot-long (25 meters) vessel’s
shape suggests that it was built for speed, indicating that it was not meant for carrying
passengers or cargo. Based on its flat bottom and keel, which are useful for
traveling in shallow water, experts believe the ship was built for use in the Nile River.
Thonis-Heracleion was a melting pot of Egyptian and Greek culture.
This much is evident in the Abu Qir Bay warship,
which features a blend of Greek shipbuilding techniques and Egyptian design and construction.
Researchers believe that it was built somewhere in Egypt using repurposed wood from older ships.
During the 2nd century B.C., a series of catastrophic earthquakes and tsunamis began
to destroy the city. The clay ground liquefied, collapsing buildings and
causing large stone blocks from the Temple of Amun to crush the warship.
Despite this, the vessel is impressively well-preserved, thanks to the clay that buried it.
It’s only the second Egyptian warship from the Ptolemaic period that has ever been found.
6. LARGEST-EVER UNDERWATER ERUPTION
In 2018, an earthquake shook the island of Mayotte, which is located in the Indian
Ocean between East Africa and Madagascar. It was caused by a volcanic event that generated
11,000 more earthquakes. In what became known as the largest underwater eruption ever recorded, a
2,690-foot-tall (820 meters) volcano was created on the seafloor.
Eruptions are nothing new in the area. In fact, the newly created volcano sits along
a 31-mile-long (50 km) ridge that was created by other lava flows. And the seismic events created
by the volcanoes appear to be ongoing. In 2019, a scientific team detected around
17,000 of these events occurring between 12 and 31 miles (19-50 km) below the ocean floor.
Based on data they collected in the region, the researchers determined
that tectonic processes probably damaged the earth’s crust and mantle,
causing magma to spew to the surface and creating the new volcano in the process. As of 2021,
the underwater earthquakes were still happening, and the seafloor was becoming even more deformed.
The most surprising aspect of the discovery is that it marks
the first time earthquakes have been detected off Mayotte. And before 2018,
the most recent known volcanic activity in the area happened between 4,000 and 6,000 years ago.
Have you ever felt an earthquake before? Let us know in the comments below and if
you’re liking this video, be sure to hit the subscribe button if you haven’t already! :)
5. VINTAGE BUGATTI
In 2009, a 1925 Bugatti Type 22 Brescia Roadster was recovered from the bottom of Lake Maggiore
along the border between Switzerland and Italy. It was heavily rusted and damaged after spending
73 years underwater, but it nevertheless sold for around $400,000 at auction.
Records revealed that the car was registered to a French address when it ended up in Lake
Maggiore in 1935. The previous year, Grand Prix driver René Dreyfus had reportedly
lost it to Swiss playboy Adalbert Bodé during a drunken poker game.
Adalbert allegedly tried to bring the car into Switzerland, but didn’t want to pay the hefty
import taxes that came along with doing so. So he told the authorities to do whatever they
wanted with the Bugatti, and they supposedly responded by rolling it into Lake Maggiore.
At the time, the vehicle wasn’t worth much. In 1967, it was rediscovered by a diver named Ugo
Pillon. A local dive club finally rescued it more than 40 years later with plans to
sell it and put the proceeds toward a charity that combats youth violence.
Peter Mullin, who owns the Mullin Automotive Museum in California,
bought the Bugatti and put it on display there. Instead of restoring it,
he left it “as is” in an exhibit that recreates the feeling of being at the bottom of a lake.
4. SUBMERGED FOREST
Off the Alabama coast in the Gulf of Mexico, there’s an ancient cypress forest that once
stood on dry land. The trees sprouted in a swamp along the banks of a river sometime
between 42,000 and 70,000 years ago, during the early part of the last ice age. At some point,
something killed them and buried them in sediment. As the climate warmed around 18,000 years ago,
sea levels rose and ocean waters moved inland, engulfing the buried swamp.
The forest sat undisturbed until 2004, when Hurricane Ivan disturbed the seabed in what
is now Mobile Bay. Journalist Ben Raines discovered the shockingly intact trees
eight miles (13 km) offshore, sitting 60 feet (18 meters) beneath the waves.
Wood normally decomposes in the ocean, but the trees were remarkably well-preserved
from being buried in sediment, where they were protected from oxygen and shipworms.
Wood samples collected by scientists reportedly still smelled of freshly-cut
cypress, according to Dr. Kristine DeLong, who is participating in ongoing research on the forest.
Her team also collected sediment cores, which revealed an unusual mixture of dark peat that
resembles potting soil beneath a top layer of sand and seashells.
Toward the bottoms of the cores, there were leaves and roots. DeLong is working with
tree and plant experts to learn more about the unusual specimens that have been found.
Researchers don’t know what type of event caused the swamp to become buried, but they believe
that there may be more submerged ancient forests near the Gulf Coast waiting to be discovered.
3. ANCIENT LANDSLIDE
During a deep dive in the Gulf of Aqaba in the northern Red Sea, geoscientist Sam Purkis and
another scientist noticed an alarming break in the seabed 3,000 feet (914 meters) below the waves.
Suspecting that this was more than a simple crack, they had the pilot turn around. It was
then that the pair observed a 15-foot-high (4.6 meters) fissure stretching across the seafloor.
Purkis could tell that a “tremendous geological force” had caused the massive break. In a recent
study, his team concluded that an underwater landslide happened around 500 years ago,
followed by a catastrophic tsunami. In his words, the seabed moved, causing part of a reef slope
to drop several meters and get stuck beneath the large quantity of rock that hangs over it.
These findings warn of the possibility of another underwater landslide, which would trigger
another tsunami. In fact, if the rock wall Pukis discovered collapsed, the ensuing tsunami would
be much bigger than the one that happened centuries ago. Based on computer simulations,
the ancient landslide may have produced a 30-foot-high (9 meters) tsunami wave,
which would have been extremely deadly. The coastline is more populated now than it was
500 years ago, and an even bigger wave would undoubtedly lead to unspeakable disaster.
The effects could devastate bustling coastal towns in Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Jordan, and Israel. None of these countries have an effective early warning system for earthquakes
and tsunamis, but Pukis recommended developing them. He said that a lot
of movement happens in the region, and that it wouldn’t take much to collapse the wall.
2. EXTINCT SPONGE GARDENS
Food is sparse beneath the ice covering the Arctic Ocean,
where algae production is limited by the lack of light that reaches the water.
So it was surprising to researchers when they discovered natural sponge gardens growing
on extinct underwater volcanoes called seamounts near the North Pole in 2016.
This sprawling, 300-year-old ecosystem is living evidence that sponges can survive
in places that were previously thought to be uninhabitable.
Found on the Langseth Ridge in the Central Arctic Ocean, these massive sponge gardens
are clearly thriving. At first, the team that discovered them was unsure of what they ate to
stay so robust in a habitat that’s largely devoid of nutrition. They later determined
that the sponges feed on the remnants of dead creatures that once lived on the seamounts.
The findings speak to the resilient nature of sponges, which are found in a variety
of environments throughout all the world’s oceans. Many host a community of microorganisms,
which facilitates the production of antibiotics, the elimination of waste,
and the transfer of nutrients. This helps to explain how the sponge gardens have a
similar biomass to specimens that live in shallow waters and have a much higher nutrient intake.
1. TOXIC WASTE
Toxic dumping is nothing new. Companies that don’t want to spend money disposing
of their waste properly often do what’s easy and illegally toss it into the ocean.
But just because the activity is common doesn’t make it any less
disturbing whenever a hazardous waste is found on the seafloor.
Last year, a team of scientists discovered more than 25,000 chemical barrels off the California
coast near Santa Catalina island. The containers, which are thought to contain DDT waste,
cover an area twice the size of Manhattan. Even the experts who expected to encounter
a large amount of rubbish were shocked by how much of it they found. It shows that the
offshore dumping went on for decades, and it’s even more disturbing to realize that
this is just one of many sites where dangerous chemicals were carelessly discarded into the sea.
Developed during the 1940s, DDT is a tasteless, colorless insecticide
that was originally used to kill insects that spread diseases like typhus and malaria.
Mounting evidence of the chemical’s threats to wildlife and the environment, and its link
to cancer and other diseases in humans, led to a worldwide ban in 1972. So it’s alarming to learn
that copious amounts of the highly toxic substance may be sitting in barrels on the ocean floor.
What’s more, there are no easy answers regarding what to do with the waste.
Removing the barrels or encasing them in cement would be extremely expensive, and
disturbing the site could break open the barrels and cause even more damage to the environment.
Thanks for watching! Which one of these discoveries is the coolest to you?
Let us know in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe! See you next time, bye! :)