Since Friday, I've had it almost continually playing in the
background on my work PC: Immersion's live broadcast from a
robot submarine exploring the bottom of the Black Sea. The first
thing I saw was a massive pile of amphorae embedded in silt.
When I logged on yesterday it became clear from the broken up
audio that the scientists behind the expedition were looking for
an ancient shipwreck. And now they're on it, rummaging around
thanks to their nifty little robotic submarine, Hercules.
They're vacuuming the sediment piled around a stub of wood that
sticks out from the bottom. This, it seems, is a piece of Sinop
D, a 1500-year-old Byzantine shipwreck which the team believe is
"the best preserved shipwreck that there is in the deep sea".
Its wooden beams, settled on the sea-floor 340 metres below the
surface of the Black Sea have been preserved this long thanks to
the fact that the water there is essentially devoid of oxygen.
As a result, there is no life - something which is painfully
obvious from the video