10: German Dornier Bomber Off the coast of Kent in the U.K., workers
managed to bring up from the depths of the English Channel a Dornier Do-17 bomber.
This military aircraft was used in World War Two and has been rusting at the bottom of
the channel for over 70 years.
Experts believe it could be the very last of its kind in existence.
These planes were originally manufactured by Germany as part of their Luftwaffe air
force, but they were all either destroyed in the fighting, scrapped after the war, or
simply lost.
Not all the pieces of the plane were pulled out of the water.
There are still a few chunks missing.
According to historical records, the plane itself was shot down in August of 1940.
Two of the crew members died during the action, but the pilot and another crew member survived
and became prisoners of war.
The wreckage was first spotted by divers in 2008.
It took a grant of nearly $400,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund to finally
fish the crashed plane out of the water all these years later.
Now the bomber will be restored to its former glory and put on display.
9: Stolen Skeleton In 2010, marine archaeologists discovered
a creepy underwater Mexican cave.
Inside the cave were human remains from thousands of years ago, including a full skeleton.
But when the marine archaeologists went back to do some more digging in 2012, they were
shocked to see that somebody had stolen the skeleton!
Someone dived into the underwater nightmare of tunnels and caverns, took the skeleton
of a person who died around 12,000 years ago, and then brought it to the surface and did
who knows what with it.
The problem was that archaeologists posted the discovery on social media when they found
the skeleton.
Somebody with the right equipment must have seen the post and went down there to take
the human remains for themselves.
Sarah Gibson, a paleontologist involved in the initial discovery, said in a blog post
that only 10% of the skeleton was left behind because it was embedded in the rock, too difficult
to be extracted by underwater graverobbers.
As for who the skeleton belonged to 12,000 years ago, researchers believe it was a teenage
girl.
She was part of the first group of people to ever call the Yucatan Peninsula home, thousands
and thousands of years before the Maya civilization ever existed.
8: Sherman Tanks A pair of American Sherman tanks have been
brought up from the bottom of the Barents Sea.
These tanks were discovered sunk off the coast of Russia, with experts believing they were
on board the Thomas Donaldson.
The Thomas Donaldson was a merchant ship from America that sank when attacked by Germans
on March 20, 1945.
At the time the ship was sunk, it was carrying a huge load of supplies for the Soviets.
Some of these supplies included the American Sherman tanks.
Sadly for the crew of the Thomas Donaldson, it was the 20th ship in its convoy.
It was the last to enter the Kola Inlet and was picked off like the weakest wolf in a
pack by a German U-boat.
A torpedo ripped through the starboard side, struck the engine room, killed three people,
and destroyed the engines.
Everybody else abandoned the ship, but the supplies and the tanks went down with the
vessel.
Just recently, it was the Russians who went through all the trouble of bringing the tanks
out of the water.
They’re in rough shape but not so destroyed that they can’t be restored and displayed
in a museum somewhere.
7: Message in a Bottle A woman in Michigan discovered a message in
a bottle that had been sitting on the bottom of the Cheboygan River for 95 years.
She had met a potential diving client and to try and entice them to go on a trip, started
fishing around for cool stuff on the riverbed.
She scooped out a giant clam shell about 12 feet deep.
Then she noticed a green bottle sitting in the muck.
She extracted the bottle from the river and was shocked to see that there was a message
sealed inside the glass.
She quickly went back to her boat and popped the cork to see what the letter said.
Unfortunately, the bottle was about two-thirds filled with water.
It was difficult to read exactly what the letter said, but four numbers stuck out like
a sore thumb: 1926.
With the help of her first mate, this woman was able to decipher the message in the bottle.
It said, “Would whoever finds this bottle return the paper inside to George Morrow and
say exactly where it was found.”
George Morrow was dead, but after a quick Facebook post, his daughter contacted the
woman who found the message in the bottle.
Her name is Michele Primeau, and she said that her father would often float notes in
bottles whenever he went on vacation at the Cheboygan River.
Judging by the date, he had sent this particular message in a bottle on his 18th birthday,
about a century ago.
If you could leave a message in a bottle and know that someone will find it in 100 years,
what would you write on it?
Let me know in the comments and don't forget to hit subscribe before the end of the video!
6: Golden Ray Shipwreck The last chunk of the Golden Ray shipwreck
was recently removed from the water off the coast of Georgia.
It was the final piece of an excavation that went on for nearly a year after the Golden
Ray tipped over with 4200 cars in its cargo deck.
The Golden Ray was a South Korean freighter with a weight of over 4410 tons (4480 metric
tons).
It capsized in September of 2019 after leaving the Port of Brunswick.
All the crew members were able to be saved, but the ship itself was a total loss.
Not only was the ship destroyed, but over $204 million worth of goods were lost to the
ocean.
According to the National Transportation Safety board, it was an officer error that caused
the ship to flip, as the officer in charge miscalculated the stability of the vessel.
Its center of gravity was too high, causing it to capsize.
Demolition work on the sunken ship started the November after it was broken, but was
delayed a few times, once by a giant fire that engulfed the chunks of boat still poking
out of the surface.
Now, the last big piece has been removed from the water, though there is still a massive
amount of debris down there.
What would you do if you saw a boat in flames on the water?
Let us know in the comments below and don’t forget to like and subscribe before the end
of the video!
5: An Ancient Canoe From a lake in Wisconsin, a 1200-year-old
canoe has been pulled from the water.
According to maritime archaeologists with the Wisconsin Historical Society, carbon dating
shows that the remarkable artifact was carved around the year 800.
This was centuries before Europeans ever made it to the region of the Great Lakes.
It's likely the oldest intact water vessel ever found in Wisconsin.
The canoe was carved from a single tree, though it's unclear which tribe was responsible for
making it.
Researchers discovered it 30 feet (9.1 m) beneath Lake Mendota, where it had been resting
for an undetermined amount of time.
The canoe was immediately taken to a preservation facility in Wisconsin and then placed in a
special storage vat.
The vat is filled with water and bio-deterrent to prevent the canoe from deteriorating further.
The preservation process to safeguard the canoe for historical prosperity will take
another three years!
4: Lost Treasure Divers in Indonesia found an amazing lost
hoard of treasure from the Srivijaya Empire.
They rescued buckets and buckets of gold and jewels from the bottom of the Musi River,
in a spot where archaeologists believe a mysterious city once stood.
The Srivijaya Empire controlled trade moving through huge parts of Asia between the 7th
century and the 11th century.
Their major city was located on the Musi River, a kind of island of gold.
But the kingdom lost its power in 1025 when the Chola Dynasty from India overtook them
as the top traders in the region.
From there, nobody is entirely sure what happened.
We know that in the 7th century, the city on the Musi River, called Palembang, was home
to over 1000 Buddhist monks.
It was a popular city for travelers moving from China to India to stop and study Sanskrit.
We also know that they were ultimately snuffed out by the Java Kingdom and pushed into extinction.
Very little evidence of their society remains today, which is what makes this newest discovery
so amazing.
For an ancient kingdom that has barely any archaeological proof of it left, pulling up
buckets of coins, gold rings, and even temple bells is something of a miracle.
3: Dead Pirates Researchers discovered human remains inside
the ruins of an old shipwreck that was once captained by Samuel Bellamy, or Black Sam
for short.
He was one of the wealthiest and most infamous pirates of all time, born in 1689.
He plundered more than Blackbeard, though his career as a pirate was quite short.
In 1717, April 26 to be exact, his ship the Whydah was wrecked off the coast of Cape Cod
and he died.
The ship was rediscovered in 1984 by the explorer Barry Clifford, who actually used a map from
1717 to locate the site.
It was found under barely 14 feet (4.26 m) of water, 260 years after it sank.
Over 200,000 pieces of ship and treasure have been retrieved since then.
The ship's bell was recovered, entire buckets of silver, and even dead pirates.
As of right now, pirate skeletons found fossilized in hardened pieces of rock taken from the
sunken vessel are being tested.
Scientists are looking at the DNA to try and figure out if one of the pirate skeletons
belongs to the infamous captain, Black Sam.
2: Barnacled Sword of a Crusader Knight Off the coast of Israel, a scuba diver recovered
a perfectly preserved sword from 900 years ago.
The sword once belonged to a crusader knight.
And even though it was found crusted with barnacles and covered in sand on the seafloor,
it is still a remarkable and imposing weapon.
The sword wasn't the only thing pulled out of the water.
Shlomi Katzin also found metal anchors and fragments of pottery, all dating back to the
era of the Crusades between 1095 and 1291.
The sword measures about 3 feet (.9 m) in length, it's made of iron, and it was almost
definitely owned by a European missionary who traveled to the Middle East between the
11th and 13th centuries as part of the Crusades.
The Crusades were a series of wars in which the Europeans tried to convert the Muslim
nations of the Middle East to Christianity by extreme force.
We don't know how the sword got lost underwater for almost a thousand years, but it could
have been down there much longer if not for the diver and the shifting sands.
It's likely that he showed up at just the right time to see a piece of the sword exposed.
Once the sword is cleaned of its barnacles, it will be put on display for everyone to
see.
1: The City of Heracleion The Egyptian city of Heracleion has been underwater
for about 3000 years.
It was lost in the 8th century BC, hundreds of years before a single stone was laid for
the foundation of the city of Alexandria.
Heracleion was there first, as the original port of entry for all ships moving from Greece
into Egypt.
But a monumental disaster caused the entire city to slip into the ocean.
Temples, statues, roads, houses – the whole city was submerged, likely by a tsunami/earthquake
combo that caused the ground to liquidate.
The French diver Franck Goddio was the one who finally discovered the city in the year
2000.
Ever since he identified the ruins of this place off the coast of Alexandria, he has
been bringing the most incredible discoveries out of the water.
Franck and his team have rescued giant statues carved from granite in the form of gods, like
Hapi, god of fertility and abundance.
They’ve rescued statues of pharaohs, queens, and gold plaques.
Stone by stone, and year by year, the ancient city of Heracleion is getting hoisted out
of its watery grave.
What’s the most incredible thing you’ve ever heard of being retrieved from the bottom
of the ocean?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments and thanks a lot for watching the video.
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