Project Investigators
The stability of shipwreck sites
Collaborations with Bangor University's School of History, Welsh History and Archaeology and The Environmental Sciences Research Institute at Ulster University.
With World War I's commemorations, UNESCO now protects WWI's this submerged heritage. UNESCO highlighted the lack of comprehensive research on shipwreck and is concerned about shipwreck site stability and the risk for divers (UNESCO, 2014), whilst the polluting potential of shipwrecks was recently recognized universally as a serious hazard. It is estimated that in Welsh waters alone, at least 100 vessels sank during WWI.
We documented the site of the sunken ship Apapa five times. This unique time-series reveals a complex interaction of the wreck with the currents, mobilising an elsewhere immobile mixed seabed and individual scour vortices unexpectedly extending to hundreds of meters beyond the wreck. During 2012, the wreck got buried on one side and undermined on the other, with erosion and deposition rates in excess of 1 m per year. Since then, these rates have varied spatially and temporally. These fluid-object interactions are difficult to reconstruct, and we hypothesise that this is due to the constantly changing mixed seabeds.
We thus focus on
- Assessing differences in anatomy and evolution of scour around shipwreck.
- Disentangle the relative impact of environmental parameters on shipwreck preservation.
- Incorporating these environmental variables into model that predict scour development.