(contemplative music)
The sea for me has a fascination.
I like being on the sea, I sleep better on a boat.
I like the smell of it, the taste of it.
And so it's somewhere where I'm happy.
Yeah the depth there is 261 meters.
261, well done.
As the ROV moves in, there's always this moment,
the green haze of water gradually resolves into this shape
and you start seeing timbers.
I feel this uncontrollable sort of surge of excitement.
Finding shipwrecks like that is breathtaking.
You're thinking, I wonder what's this gonna be.
(contemplative music)
(bright music)
Sailing east at six knots,
the 3000 ton Stril Explorer
heads into the mysterious waters of the Black Sea.
She's making for a set of coordinates
off the Bulgarian coast.
(speaking in foreign language)
On board, and international team of scientists,
lead by Jon Adams, one of the maritime archeologists
who raised King Henry VIII's flagship, the Mary Rose.
We have some good target areas
that we would like to get a little bit more information
but these are the selected locations
and what we've done is we've given the coordinates
to the bridge.
We're steaming off to do the first one now.
More used to battling the storms
of the North Sea for the oil industry,
the high-tech Scandinavian survey vessel
will be the operational centerpiece of the expedition.
Bridge deck?
Go ahead.
Yeah, just let us secure the leg.
Okay, thank you.
10:15, okay.
We're heading straight towards where we said we'd be.
(dynamic music)
The Stril Explorer is incredible ocean-going survey vessel.
With all the systems that anybody could possibly need.
If I was to design a vessel and equipment
to do deep-water archeology, this is it.
For the next four weeks,
home, family, life on land will take a back seat
in a quest to uncover the story of the Black Sea.
(dynamic music)
(waves lapping)
This vast sea was once a prehistoric lake,
unconnected to the world's oceans.
How it then flooded remains disputed.
Some scientist have argued there was a catastrophic deluge
which inspired the Biblical flood story.
Along its shores they've found evidence of early humans
who settled here, worked the land, discovered gold.
In the sea's hidden depths, archeologist believe
there may be evidence of ancient seafaring.
Shipwrecks from long lost empires
that could date back 3,000 years
to when the Greeks first landed on the Black Sea's shores.
Until now, this sea has remained little explored.
Flanked by six countries, the Black Sea was,
for much of the 20th century,
hidden behind the Iron Curtain.
For the next three years Jon Adams and his team
will search for evidence of the lost civilizations
and the ancient peoples who lived and sailed
on this mysterious sea.
The whole area is an archeological hotspot
in terms of what we know about ancient civilizations
along its shores.
And in theory we would expect tremendously exciting
remains from past cultures underwater as well.
(contemplative music)
Adams' right hand man is Kroum Batchvarov,
one of the few maritime archeologist ever
to have worked on a Black Sea shipwreck.
This is going to sound cheesy
but we really are making history.
The shipwrecks that we're likely to find,
they're thousands upon thousands of years of seafaring
in this region and we know virtually nothing about it.
Helen Farr specializes in prehistory,
uncovering the worlds in which ancient peoples lived.
Understanding that human narrative against the backdrop
of this changing landscape of sea level rise
is really important for understanding where we've come from,
who we are, what makes humans human.
It's something that people are really engaged with.
ROV submit.
Managing the team's state of the art
imaging systems is maritime archeologist
Rodrigo Pacheco-Ruiz.
The Black Sea has never been explored this way.
It's virgin territory.
There's very little archeology done here.
You know this is the biggest museum in the world.
And it's all underwater so, a lot of exciting stuff.
(speaking in foreign language)
Ah, here's Jon.
Are we ready?
Almostish?
My estimate is about another 30, 35 minutes.
Excellent. Good.
All right.
(speaking in foreign language)
Stril Explorer, Stril Explorer.
(speaking in foreign language)
Just for information we are conducting sub-sea operation.
Can you keep clear of us one nautical mile please?
Thank you very much.
Okay I will be clear of you one--
The Stril reaches the coordinates
where sonar has located a signature at 300 meters.
But what's down there, no one is sure.
Alongside the scientists is a team of deep sea surveyors,
equipped with the latest laser and sonar technology.
And six pilots for the remotely operated vehicles or ROVs.
Linked to the ship by a fiber-optic cable,
the Supporter ROV can reach depths of nearly 2000 meters.
Gliding through the water with the touch of a joystick.
Y'all are ready?
Yes ready, ready, take it away guys.
All stations ROV off deck.
(intense music)
(bubbles gurgling)
Bridge, confirm I have a green light for diving?
Yes you have.
Thank you, Colin out.
Adams' command post is the ROV pilot's cabin.
The Supporter's eight cameras will open a window
to an undiscovered world.
Calibrating the camera yeah,
and then getting the lights right.
Okey dokey.
Let me know.
As it descends,
the Supporter gets closer and closer
to what makes the Black Sea unique.
At a depth of 150 meters, oxygen in the water disappears.
The sea becomes a dead zone.
Go up?
Yeah, the depth here is 261 meters.
261, well dumno.
Come on guys.
(otherworldly music)
(serene music)
You told me to tell you.
Again, that camera.
Ooo, look at that.
It's stunning, my god!
Look at that.
Oh this is beautiful.
Oh this is absolutely beautiful.
Much of the wreck has been preserved.
The wooden balustrades around the quarter-deck.
The ropes for working the sails.
In other seas, most of this wreck would not have survived.
That's quite a lot of rope.
Oh yes.
That's brilliant.
Look at the mast leaning against the beam.
Yeah absolutely, absolutely.
But have you seen the carving?
Oh the carving, it's all over the place.
Absolutely beautiful.
The carved patterns of flowers and vines
are Islamic.
The ship would have sailed during the Ottoman Empire.
Probably around 300 years ago.
Its just unbelievable, it's just unbelievable.
I just.
You ever see that?
No, no, no.
Not live, not doing it now.
It's down there, 300 meters.
We are discovering it, we are looking at it.
Now for the first time.
(gentle music)
Three centuries ago,
the Black Sea was a prized possession of the Ottoman Empire.
Merchant ships plied their trade along its coastline.
A vital supply line for the Ottoman capital, Constantinople.
Today's Istanbul.
Within a century of its capture, close to 700,000 people
lived in this teeming city.
Feeding the growing population was a priority
for the Ottoman rulers.
Ports at the mouths of the great rivers
that fed into the Black Sea from Russia and Europe
were vital trading post and were quickly captured.
An armada of small traders began to ferry vital supplies
back to Constantinople.
Some ships, their hulls laden with grain from the Balkans,
precious metals from the Caucuses, never made it home.
In theory, shipwrecks that come to rest
in 300 meters of water should be well preserved
but we didn't really know.
So the first time we started to see an Ottoman wreck,
that was a moment.
It really is like this and we can see wonderful things
all over the bottom of this sea potentially.
(horn bellowing)
(speaking in foreign language)
The expedition to the Black Sea
began 12 months earlier on a Greek survey ship, the Aegaeo.
(contemplative music)
Adams' mission was to settle a scientific argument
that has divided archeology for decades.
How the Black Sea flooded.
Using a sonar device called a tow-fish
which emits powerful pulses of sound,
the team surveys the sea floor.
(ticking)
The sounds pulses penetrate the seabed,
feeding back a detailed profile of the prehistoric landscape
that once existed.
(contemplative music)
20,000 years ago, the Black Sea looked very different.
In the grip of the last ice age,
global sea levels were much lower
and the Black Sea was a smaller fresh water lake.
Early humans probably lived and hunted on its shores.
At the moment we are more or less steaming
over the paleo shoreline.
In other words, from here in that way
towards land of Bulgaria which we can see on the horizon,
everything was dry land once upon a time.
(contemplative music)
For decades, most geologist agree
that as the ice age ended,
fresh water from the surrounding river poured into the lake.
Over thousands of years, it slowly filled up.
Eventually the lake reached the Bosphorus
and began to mix with seawater from the Mediterranean.
Creating the Black Sea that exists today.
Then in 1997, the theory was challenged
by two American scientists, Walter Pittman and William Ryan.
They argued that there was little change
to the prehistoric lake until a few thousand years ago
when the rising seawater level of the Mediterranean
burst through the Bosporus.
The theory sparked huge public interest
recalling Noah and the Biblical flood.
(contemplative music)
In three weeks of surveying with the towfish,
the team creates a map of the ancient buried landscape.
The first step in uncovering how the Black Sea formed.
(waves lapping)
Using a second towfish, the team begin a new search.
This time, they're looking for shipwrecks.
In most oceans, ancient ships have long disappeared.
Their wooden timbers eaten by shipworm
as on this 2,000 year old Greek wreck.
But in the Black Sea,
because oxygen below 150 meters disappears,
the water is anoxic and doesn't support life
such as shipworm.
It could mean that ships from long ago empires
still might exist on the seabed.
It's probably part of a barge.
This is the first one that really
sprang out of the screen at us screaming shipwreck.
Even if it's recent this could actually be a really,
really interesting find.
And this is the deepest one, almost 300 meters, 278.
This one's very interesting, that's really good.
We've got collapsed beams and all sorts of things.
You've certainly got what looks like structural timbers
all the way around.
In a way I think it's the most interesting.
(dynamic music)
(speaking in foreign language)
The Stril is heading further out to sea
to deeper water
where the team hope that older wrecks may still lie.
Untouched for perhaps thousands of years.
You can never tell where the ancient shipwrecks will be
but we go down below 150 meters,
preservation becomes dramatically better.
So if you're looking for ancient shipwrecks,
look in the deeper water.
You might get lucky and find some really early stuff.
(contemplative music)
Online and ROV this is bridge.
We are starting position, ready to start whenever you are.
We copy.
Latch open, stand by.
Stand by.
The wreck signature they'll inspect
will take the ROV deeper than it's ever been before,
1,800 meters.
A 40 minute journey to the seabed.
My personal favorite on the wishlist
is a medieval Byzantine shipwreck.
If we find one of those ships I'll be very happy.
(pensive music)
There it is, yeah.
This definitely looks like from the 17th century
Eastern Mediterranean cargo vessel.
That would explain the straight sternpost.
Like the earlier find,
the ship is from the Ottoman Period,
from two to three hundred years ago.
Okay, might as well Cathx.
Ready for contacts? Yeah.
Cathx is one of the ROV's high definition cameras
which photographs the wreck in minute detail.
And it's part of a revolutionary method in surveying wrecks
in deep water, called photogrammetry.
We capture a series of stills at the frame rate
of three every second.
So from this wreck we managed to get 700 photos.
So that's a lot of high resolution photography.
The software stitches it together basically
and you start getting a much better idea
of details of the ship.
The levels of technology have become so advanced.
The things that we used to dream of
as methods of three dimensional recording
things underwater with speed and accuracy now are here.
So to a certain extent you can do an awful lot
sitting in a control, Brian with a cup of coffee in one hand
and a joystick in the other.
Now it's fantastic.
With the image now stitched together,
the team have the precise dimensions of the ship.
Can record every timber, and in this case,
identify every artifact that might otherwise stay hidden.
From the photogrammetry model,
there appears to be an object wedged under a timber
near the stern of the wreck.
You see 'em?
Yes sir.
Stand by. Stand by.
Using the fiberoptically controlled
manipulator arm, the ROV pilot, Brian Garr,
begins the challenging process of retrieving the artifact.
(suspenseful music)
There's an old expression that archeologist
don't dig up things but people.
But it's the things that allow us to get to the people.
Easy out.
We are faced with the material evidence.
The immediacy of that is what fills your brain initially.
And then we start thinking about the people
and wondering what happened.
Most of those shipwrecks out there,
there's no obvious reason that they sunk.
They're on the bottom of the sea.
They probably went down in bad storms.
It would have been a very dire situation to be in.
Well done.
(crew applauding)
What we are looking at is two clay braziers.
On the left one we see traces of burning
and traces of concreted ashes and charcoal
which comes to show that the brazier was actively used.
In fact when we discovered it it was still full of ashes.
So yeah, this brazier probably contained
the remains of the last meal that was eaten
on board the boat.
(waves crashing)
(contemplative music)
You're talking to these people.
They suddenly become alive.
They are right next to you.
For Kroum Batchvarov
ships are the closest possible connection
to long lost empires.
A way to understand the past and its people.
For more than two years he's been working on the Vasa,
a 17th century Swedish warship.
If you study the timbers properly
you're going to see the marks from the tools.
You will learn to recognize their signature on the
by the way they use their tools.
Batchvarov has been painstakingly examining
each timber of the ship's frame,
carefully reconstructing how the Vasa was built.
It is the first time that we are really
developing an understanding how the shipwrights
put her together.
There are not two timbers that are exactly the same
aboard the ship or that are even universally squared.
The capability of dealing with
complicated engineering problems
this is telling something about the mental state
of these people.
How much they understood the forces
that were acting upon their ships.
How did they solve the problem of creating a regularly
operational vessel that was safe,
that made it sure it will bring its cargo
and preferably also its crew back home
at the end of the voyage.
(suspenseful music)
In the case of the Vasa,
disaster struck on its maiden voyage.
Human error causing it to sink before it had left
Stockholm Harbor.
When it was raised 60 years ago,
archeologists found that the ship, buried in sediment,
had been largely preserved.
Seeing the ship the first time was
the closest to a religious experience that I've ever had.
To me it was entering a cathedral,
medieval gothic cathedral.
That sense of awe, that overwhelming feeling,
has never left me.
Survey Bridge?
Yes go ahead.
We are okay to start operations
and we are also on position.
For over two weeks the Stril has been at sea.
Scientists, surveyors, and ROV pilots working day and night.
(phone trilling)
Must be hard
to keep in touch with your daughters Joakim.
Yeah, this is life at sea Horowitz.
When you have the time to call
they might be doing something else.
There's nothing you can do about it.
Hey, it's Mommy.
Hello.
Are you miss me?
(laughing) Yeah, I do.
Do you miss me?
I heard that Aunty Dandelion
came and painted your fingernails.
Just time to be honest.
I think it's kind of normally when she'd be asleep
lying in bed.
(child crying) That's okay.
Okay, bye.
The hunt for shipwrecks goes on.
All right, 10 meters to go.
But the team is struggling to find
anything older than Ottomans from around 300 years ago.
Ah, not another one.
Oh yeah.
Same old, same old.
Ah, dear oh dear.
It's yet another one.
It's another one to add to our fleet.
Accept for all--
I think it's a smaller example
than some of the bigger ones that we've seen
but it's the same generic type.
It's disappointing. (chuckling)
None of the discoveries of the ancient wrecks
the deeper anoxic water would hold.
(mechanical pulsing)
ROV Surveyor.
Hello Surveyor.
Were we not just at this shipwreck?
(all chuckling)
You hear the official designation of this sort of ship
the IKEA wreck because they're all the same
and they come virtually flat-packed. (chuckling)
Each inspection takes time,
as much as six hours.
It's eating into the schedule.
They can't take shortcuts.
Every wreck could be the ancient ship they're looking for.
Priced at 20 million dollars, the expedition
has high expectations of making ancient discoveries.
In these this case there's so much money involved,
there's so many people involved as well
and there's a lot of stress, there's a lot of tension.
There's only one chance.
It's uneconomic to get it wrong, basically, at this scale.
There's a lot of pressure, there's a lot of pressure
to get it right. Yeah.
(suspenseful music)
Right, same stuff.
Bloody hell.
That's what it is, archeology is like that.
You just have to work with what you have
but it'll be nice to have something else.
Oh dear oh dear.
Okay, time to leave the crime scene.
Time is running out.
Jon Adams needs more than IKEA wrecks.
(squeaking)
(garbled radio chatter)
He also still has to determine
exactly how and when the Black Sea flooded.
It will take much of the Stril's resources
and many days of ship time.
Surveyor, the report at the surface.
Everything good here, thank you.
Crane you can lower it down.
Copy that, go down.
Armed with last year's map
of the buried landscape
the team selects specific sites on the seabed to core.
(splashing)
(otherworldly music)
Six meter long hollow tubes are lowered onto the seabed,
then pushed into the soft mud.
Once extracted, they'll contain a core of sediment
that could date back tens of thousands of years.
(auto-hammer pounding)
This is fantastic.
A full six meters of consolidated sediment.
What you're looking at here contains all the evidence
for how the environment was at the time
and how it changed over time
and that will hopefully help us to address
some of the big debates.
When it happened, how it happened, and what effects it had
on human populations living in the region at the time.
73 sites have been selected
along the shallow coastal shelf
and further out in deeper water.
The team hopes the cores contain evidence
of the prehistoric lake shore,
the first step in understanding when and how
the inundation happened.
(mechanical whirring)
There you go. Not too bad.
Some nice shell material.
Bit of shell there. Right.
In this core, thick mud sits at the top
but further back in time, towards the bottom,
mixed in with the sediment are pieces of shell.
They could be evidence of the lake's prehistoric coastline.
Oh yes.
So we see that and we go huh, that looks familiar,
that looks like a beach.
Why is that underwater?
Well it's ancient beach from before it got submerged.
So if I can understand where that coastline was
then we can start looking at that coastline,
thinking about it.
What was the geography in the past of the Black Sea?
With 73 cores to extract,
every hour of daylight is precious
and that means the search for wrecks
has to go on through the night.
ROV Olag can you just set up the ROV
on the line, your heading turn--
In the early hours of the morning,
after three weeks at sea,
the team finally finds new wreck signature.
I'd given up and gone to bed
'cause I'd been up for about 24 hours
and lo and behold the phone rings.
They said Jon, Jon, do you want to see something different?
What have we got?
Do a couple more flyovers with this unit.
Just do it, just to indulge me.
Wide angle please.
Yeah sure.
And just a touch higher.
Okay.
Perfect, perfect.
Okay, off we go.
The eeriness of the mast
just sticking out of he darkness, incredible.
Beautiful stuff Colin. Yes.
Do I see tool-marks on that stem?
Can we just, can we just take a little bit of a lower
look down this as we come around?
The new wreck isn't an Ottoman.
It's older.
500 years older.
A merchant ship, most likely built in Italy.
We're looking at a date, around probably 1,200-1,400,
something like that.
And we find pictures of them or reliefs
carved in churches and things but this is the first time
anybody's seen anything like this.
The thing for real, almost intact.
It's amazing.
It's the sort of ship that Marco Polo might have sailed on.
When the great medieval explorer Marco Polo
returned in 1295 to Venice from 24 years in the east,
he traveled home by sail.
His last sea leg was across the Black Sea
on a ship much like this.
Then you start thinking well,
the last time that ship was seen
was probably the last time those people saw anything.
What would that have been like for them?
It must have been terrifying.
Suddenly it becomes about group of peoples'
very real demise.
And then we were finished and the ROV just drew back.
Suddenly I thought there but the grace of god go I.
(contemplative music)
Lifting a wreck of this age to the surface
would cost tens of millions of dollars.
3D photogrammetry means they don't have to.
Archeologist now have digital tools with which
to explore the wrecks.
Long after the ROV has left the seabed.
That little Mediterranean ship probably built in Venice
or somewhere like that gives us a way into history
that we can't get by any other means.
If you look at the ships in Northern Europe in the 1500s,
like the Mary Rose, that's the other end of the process.
So the Mediterranean ship that we found is the before
and the Mary Rose is the after.
(splashing)
Point the jib west.
Jib west, roger, stand by.
Jib west.
That's that way.
Jon Adams began work on raising the Mary Rose
in the late 1970s.
It quickly became the biggest maritime archeological project
ever undertaken and revealed the ship as a unique document
detailing life in Medieval England.
(contemplative music)
I can picture myself as though it was yesterday.
Being inside this amazing structure.
All the guns were still in place at the time we found them
and there were shot and ropes and longbows
and all sorts of other stuff lying around.
In fact you could swim at one point
from one end of the main deck to the other.
Past all these guns, looking down at the guns
still pointing out through the gun-ports.
And it was just the most amazing experience.
The more we learnt about the ship the more it surprised us.
The ingenuity of the way in which the
internal space was organized and the fixtures and fittings
and the rig and all the other equipment
including of course, the guns.
The ingenuity of how to create this complex floating society
in this structure of thousands of components.
This was a new thing for Europe at the time.
Medieval Europe was changing
from a patchwork of small city states
to powerful nations ruled by monarchies.
Henry the VIII personally paid for the construction
of the Mary Rose.
A potent symbol of his and England's status.
Ships can be seen at this period
as the tools of state-building
because they're now the new form of castle.
They're floating castles, you can take your power
where you want them.
Now when we look at that Italian ship in the Black Sea,
that is the stage of maritime technological development
before this process of technological change happens.
19,000 artifacts were uncovered
from the Mary Rose.
Each one adding to an intimate portrait of life
lived 500 years ago.
(pensive music)
A shipwreck is an accident and it's a floating society
therefore it contains not only the ship,
its technology, its fixtures, its fittings, its rig.
The personal possessions of the crew, their equipment.
You've got this whole complex structure
and all the objects of those people on board.
When you look at a shipwreck you have the best way
of getting at the people that is possible really.
55 meters at 332 bearing.
55 meters at 332 degrees, drop them off?
Drop them off.
Back on the Stril,
something's gone wrong with the latest dive.
When you come to a stop on the vessel
then we'll see if it gets it in again.
Copy that.
Now there's a really, really bad current there
so I would try to turn.
Yes there is.
Can you do a fix on there now?
Yep, sure bridge.
Say again please.
Yes bridge.
Winch away.
Yeah you need to know this is a critical situation.
We're trying to get up and I need to you to speak up
on the coms please.
500 meters down there's a problem with the ROV.
We lost our hydro-acoustic positioning.
It's there but it's not coming up.
Zero depth so I'm not too sure what's up there.
Don't trust this position because definitely
we're not getting anything.
Right.
The Supporter's positioning beacon has broken.
There's several million dollars worth of submersible
out there, somewhere.
(thunder rumbling)
We have a loop of 760 meter of cable now
and we have only 470 meter under the boat
so we cannot just pull in on the loop.
The current has dragged the ROV
nearly half a kilometer out to sea.
But in which direction, no one knows.
Can't really see the cable.
(garbled radio chatter)
Jovan can you get one of the guys on the bridge
to go out and have a look on the miracle cable
and tell me which directions it's going?
If the Supporter is lost,
it'll put a stop to the expedition's hunt for wrecks.
ROV Surveyor?
Yes.
Yeah we have your positioning about 400 meters
from the vessel.
We need to track that to the vessel.
(winch whirring)
Flying blind, all Brian Garr can do
is slowly reel the ROV back onboard.
Without crashing it into the ship's hull.
You see now we're coming up quite fast.
Maybe we lost it, maybe we lost it.
(dramatic music)
(cable straining)
All stations are re-up and back.
(cheering and applauding)
I'm so relieved. (chuckling)
I had this horror of sort of going along
with these sort of millions and millions of pounds
worth of equipment.
Ah.
You take that end.
The coring of the Black Sea
in search of the prehistoric coastline is nearly complete.
Most of the 73 cores have been extracted
from the shallow coastal shelf and from deeper waters.
They've all been sorted but they now need to go
back in a crate and away.
One will attract particular interest, core 59.
(contemplative music)
At the U.K.'s National Oceanography Center
scientist from the expedition have found evidence
of the prehistoric lake.
As you can see we've got almost four meters of pure shell.
If we take a sample from here we have a real mixture.
You can see that we have some, slightly more intact shells,
some that's slight broken, and then we have this
completely ground down shell within it
and this is really where what's happened is
wave energy in a dynamic environment has basically
churned this around.
Breaking 'em down into almost what looks like,
in some places, like as sand
and that's really good evidence that we're on the edge
of the Black Sea Lake as it was then.
Taken 60 kilometers off the present day coast,
the core gives a precise location of the prehistoric lake.
It's shores would have been surrounded by tens of thousands
of square kilometers of dry land that is now submerged.
That takes you to pretty much where
it begins to start dropping off into the real depths.
For Helen Farr, the results could be evidence
of how early humans might have existed on this land.
So that's a large amount of continental shelf here.
That would have been possibly inhabited,
crossed by people that were looking for
the resources that they needed to live.
The Black Sea was a great environment.
You've got rich areas which would have had game
and things to hunt.
You've got fish resources, you've got stone,
so you've got all the things that you really need
to be successful.
Now the scientist need to resolve how
this vast expanse of prehistoric land flooded.
Slowly or catastrophically.
Would people notice it, would that affect people's lives?
What about if it was catastrophic?
How quick is catastrophic?
(gentle music)
55 meters at 332 degrees.
Drop them off?
Drop them off.
All stations ROV off deck.
There's a new find.
Sitting in the shallow waters
of the Bulgarian coastal shelf.
It looks interesting.
I'm refusing to get excited until I know that it's not
a fiberglass replica that's fallen off a container ship
on it's way to a fairground in Georgia or somewhere
so I'm just, you know, not going to allow myself
to get excited.
I mean it could be all sorts of things.
It's just that it looks as though it could be special.
(suspenseful music)
(contemplative music)
Right, we wanna be in there somewhere.
Cheers.
ROV copy, stand by.
20 seconds.
(pensive music)
There is a big-- Something looming.
Yeah.
Here we go. I knew it.
When we came into the wreck
you immediately got the feeling
that this was a wreck that had been down there
many centuries.
So we had a ship on the seabed
with structures still poking through the seabed.
More or less upright because the shape we could see
in the multi-beam was symmetrical.
So it wasn't on one side, it wasn't smashed up.
And the shape of it looked unlike
sort of post-medieval ships
so we suspected it could be earlier.
Inches, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so if we just pull back again
and look down on the whole thing.
And what's this coming up here?
Ah yes!
(laughing)
Embedded in the sediment is and amphorae.
An ancient clay vessel used for transporting wine
and olive oil.
As we looked at it from more and more angles
it became more and more obvious
that it was some sort of Byzantine type
which immediately puts it into the sort of
maybe 1,000 years old or something.
It's the oldest wreck they've found.
A merchant ship from Byzantine Empire.
Starting a new page in history
we just turned today.
I could not be happier.
It might be 1,000 years old
but no one can date the wreck precisely.
The amphorae could hold the answer.
If they could retrieve it they can date it more closely.
Well for all of us.
For Jon Adams, the Byzantine at 95 meters
is close enough to touch.
Which gasses we would use.
And diving onto the wreck
would give the maritime archeologist
the chance to inspect the ancient ship first-hand.
You can do a lot with ROVs these days
and of course the photogrammetry is a fantastic way
of recording these things in three dimensions.
Incredibly quickly.
But as an archeologist, to actually dive on a shipwreck site
I always learn more than I could remotely.
And I always understand more as a result.
(splashing)
Going down there yourself just gives it an extra,
there's an extra sort of ah, I see, I understand that.
But such a deep dive is dangerous.
(water sloshing) (hoist whirring)
Going to small deep is like which gasses we would use.
Are we gonna--
At the safety meeting,
there are worries that the dive is too risky.
95 meters is a substantial dive
and it calls a medic on board for any hurt
damage people divers.
And we have the safety divers that will also assist in this.
If the safety divers are hovering in 20
and the diver needs to be recovered from the bottom
or assisted, what do we do between 60 and 20 meters?
Yeah and that's-- That's the problem.
It's a bit tricky in this kind of situation.
The first thing here to do is just make the air breathing.
Then we'll see and go up a little bit
because even when you're full of helium
if you go up so fast you bring body.
You're talking about the diving equivalent
of having had a heart attack
driving a car a 70 miles an hour on a motorway.
I'm mean, you know, it's easy death.
If Jon Adams dives, and anything goes wrong,
the entire expedition will be jeopardized.
(uplifting music)
It's the final year of the expedition.
The team are back on the Black Sea.
On a bigger boat in the quest to discover
if there are even older shipwrecks.
Sending the ROVs down to even deeper water.
What's this, what's this?
The team make a series of groundbreaking finds.
Roman wrecks from the 2nd century A.D.
More intact than any Roman ship ever found.
A complete cargo of amphora still on the decks
of the ship that carried it.
I mean it's probably one of the most
important shipwreck finds ever.
And they discover a Greek ship
that would have sailed these waters
two and a half thousand years ago.
(gentle music)