(CNN) – The wreck of a ship that tried to warn the RMS Titanic of the iceberg that sank her on her maiden voyage has been found at the bottom of the Irish Sea.
On April 15, 1912, the British merchant steamer SS Mesaba sent a warning radio message to the Titanic while crossing the Atlantic. The message was received by the Titanic, which was advertised as unsinkable, but did not reach the ship’s main control center.
Later that night, the Titanic collided with the iceberg and sank. More than 1,500 people died in what is still the most notorious shipwreck in the world.
The Mesaba remained a merchant ship until 1918 when she was torpedoed in convoy by a German U-boat. Twenty people, including the ship’s commander, died.
Its exact location was unknown for more than a century, but scientists have now found the wreck of the Mesaba using multibeam sonar. The offshore survey tool uses sound waves to map the seabed in sufficient detail to show superstructure on sonar images, allowing researchers from Bangor University and Bournemouth University in the UK to positively identify the shipwreck in the Irish Sea.
According to a press release, this was the first time researchers were able to locate and positively identify the wreck.
‘Pieces of the Puzzle’
Michael Roberts, a marine geoscientist at Bangor University in Wales, led the sonar survey at the university’s School of Ocean Sciences.
For several years he has been working with the marine renewable energy sector to study the ocean’s impact on energy-generating infrastructure. Shipwrecks proved to be a valuable source of information in this area.
“We knew there were a lot of shipwrecks in our backyard in the Irish Sea,” Roberts told CNN on Wednesday, adding they could “give useful insight into what happens when things hit the seabed.”
The Titanic sank in the North Atlantic after striking an iceberg on April 15, 1912.
But it wasn’t until Roberts began working with Innes McCartney, a marine archaeologist and research fellow at Bangor University, that the “pieces of the puzzle” began to fall into place.
“McCartney was really interested in applying this technology to shipwrecks to identify them,” Roberts said. The research team began digging deeper into unsolved mysteries to “tear out their stories.”
“We used to be able to dive to a few spots a year to visually identify wrecks. The unique sonar capabilities of the (purpose-built research vessel) Prince Madog have allowed us to develop a relatively inexpensive means of studying the wrecks. We can tie this to the historical information without costly physical interaction with each site,” McCartney added in the press release.
Roberts said the cost of discovering and identifying each wreck ranged from £800 ($855) to £1,000 ($1,070).
A “game changer” for marine archaeology
A total of 273 shipwrecks from the Prince Madog have been found, spread across 7,500 square miles of the Irish Sea – an area roughly the size of Slovenia.
The wrecks were scanned and cross-checked against the UK Hydrographic Office wreck database and other sources.
Many of the newly identified wrecks, including the Mesaba, have been misidentified in the past, researchers said.
McCartney described the multibeam sonar technique as “a ‘game changer’ for marine archaeology,” allowing historians to use the data provided to fill in gaps in their understanding.
Prince Madog, Bangor University’s survey ship, leaves its berth at Menai Bridge, Anglesey, North Wales in 2016.
David Roberts/University of Bangor
Prince Madog was commissioned by Bangor University and is managed and operated by offshore service provider OS Energy. It “really allows us to go out up to 10 days at a time and go back and forth between ships point by point,” Roberts said. “We did 15, 20, 25 wrecks a day. It’s the ship that underpins everything.”
The technology the ship uses has the potential to be just as effective for marine archaeologists as land-based archaeologists’ use of aerial photography, according to the press release.
“A lot of these wrecks are in deep water. There’s no light down there, so you can’t see much at all,” Roberts said. “If a diver went down and swam the length of the wreck, they would never get the kind of images we would get because of the size of these things. There is so much sediment that you just can’t see everything. “
“So it’s a way to use sound to visualize really effectively to see something you can’t see with the naked eye — like an ultrasound during pregnancy.”
While the technology has the potential to uncover the stories of all these lost ships, Roberts added that researchers “have also been studying these wreck sites to better understand how objects on the seafloor interact with physical and biological processes, which in turn can help scientists.” , to support the development and growth of the ocean energy sector.”
Details of all the wrecks have been published in a new book by McCartney, Echoes from the Deep.
Pictured above: The SS Mesaba was torpedoed in convoy in 1918, six years after attempting to warn the Titanic of the iceberg.